LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



®]^ap iquji-ijl^t !f a. 

Shelf 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




PERICLES. 



GREAT LEADERS 



HISTORIC PORTRAITS 



FROM THE GREAT HISTORIANS 



SELECTED, WITH NOTES AND B^EF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES 

By G^'^t:^ FERRIS 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1889 






THE LIBHAKY 
OF CONGR£fS 

IWASHINGTOW 



Copyright, 1889, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



PKEFACE. 



Every one perusing the pages of the historians must 
have been impressed with the graphic and singularly pene- 
trative character of many of the sketches of the distin- 
guished persons whose doings form the staple of history. 
These pen-portraits often stand out from the narrative with 
luminous and vivid effect, the writers seeming to have con- 
centrated upon them all their powers of penetration and all 
their skill in graphic delineation. Few things in literature 
are marked by analysis so close, discernment so keen, or 
by effects so brilliant and dramatic. In some of the later 
historians this feature is specially noticeable, but it was 
Hume's admirable portrayal of the character of Alfred the 
Great that suggested the compilation of the present volume. 

A selection such as this of the more striking passages 
in the great historians will serve, it is believed, a double 
purpose — first as a suitable introduction to these distin- 
guished writers for those not acquainted with them, and 
next as a means of stimulating a taste for the study of his- 
tory itself. It must be remembered that it is largely 
through their sympathies for persons that readers gener- 
ally find pleasure in history. The sometimes noble and 
sometimes startling personality of great leaders exerts a fas- 



iy PREFACE. 

cinating effect upon all susceptible minds, and whatever 
brings this personality vividly before us greatly strengthens 
our interest in the records of the past. For these reasons 
this compilation will be found well adapted for the read- 
ing class in high schools and seminaries. 

It is desirable to explain that in some instances the 
selections do not appear here exactly in the form of the 
original. Passages from different pages are sometimes 
brought together, so as to give completeness to the por- 
trait, but in no other way has any liberty been taken 
with the text of the authors. 

In making the selections, the primary object was to 
secure, in each instance, the most vivid and truthful por- 
trait obtainable, but it was also thought desirable to ren- 
der the volume as representative of historical literature 
as possible, and hence to include a wide range of writers. 
The work will be found to be tolerably representative in 
this particular, but some well-known historians do not 
appear, for the reason that their methods did not yield 
suitable material. 

The selections terminate with the period of Waterloo, 
because, while great leaders have flourished since those 
days, the historical perspective is not sufficient to permit 
that judicial estimate so necessary for a truly valuable 
portrait. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

THEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES. By George Grote ... 1 

{From the " History of Greece^) - 

PERICLES. By Ernst Curtius 6 

{From the " History of Greece^) 

EPAMINONDAS. By Ernst Curtius 10 

{From the " History of Greece^) 

ALEXANDER THE GREAT. By George Grote .... 14 

{From the " History of Greece^) 

HANNIBAL. By Theodor Mommsen 19 

{From the " History of Homey) 

THE GRACCHL By Plutarch 23 

{From '''■ Plutarch'' s lives.'") 

CAIUS MARIUS. By James Anthony Froude 27 

{From ^^Julitis Ccesar — A Sketcli.^^) 

MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS. By Theodor Mommsen . . 32 

{From the ''History of Rome:') 

LUCIUS SYLLA. By James Anthony Froude . . . .37 

{From ^'Juliits Ccesar — A SketcJiy) 

POMPEY. By Thomas Kerchever Arnold 41 

{From the ''History of Borne y) 

SERTORIUS. By Plutarch 44 

{From " Plutarch's Lives:') 

JULIUS C^SAR. By James Anthony Froude . . . .49 

{From " Julius Ccesar — A Sketchy) 

TRAJAN. By Charles Merit ale 63 

{From the ''History of the Romans under the Fivjnrey) 



^i CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

THE ANTONINES. Ry Edward Gibbon 56 

{From the "-History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:') 

ZENOBIA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. By Edward Gibbon . . 60 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^) 

CONSTANTINE, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR. By Edward 

Gibbon 65 

{From the '■'■ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^) 

JULIAN THE APOSTATE. By Edward Gibbon .... 70 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fcdl of the Roman Empirey) 

THEODOSIUS THE GREAT. By Edward Gibbon . . . .77 
(From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:^) 

ATTILA, THE SCOURGE OF GOD. By Edward Gibbon . .83 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empirey) 

BELISARIUS. By Lord Mahon 88 

{From, the " Life of Bclisarius.'''') 

MOHAMMED, THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM. By Edward Gibbon . 92 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^) 

CHARLEMAGNE. By Sir James Stephen 100 

{From ^'■Lectures on the History of France.'''') 

ALFRED THE GREAT, OF ENGLAND. By David Hume . . 107 

{From the ^'■History of England^) 

OLAF TRYGGVESON, KING OF NORWAY. By Thomas Carlyle .111 

{From the ''^ Early Kings of Norway y) 

CNUT OR CANUTE OF ENGLAND, ALSO KING OF DENMARK. 

By John Richard Green 116 

{From the " Short History of the English Peopled) 

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. By John Richard Green . .120 
{From the " Short History of the English Peopled) 

ROBERT GUISCARD. By Edward Gibbon 126 

{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^) 

THOMAS A BECKET, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. By 

David Hume 130 

{From the ^''History of England^) 

SALADIN. By Edward Gibbon 135 

{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:') 



CONTENTS, vii 

PAGE 

HENRY II, KING OF ENGLAND. By David Hume . . .138 

{From the ^^ History of England?'') 

GENGHIS OR ZINGIS KHAN. By Edward Gibbon . . .142 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'''') 

SIMON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER. By John Rich- 
ard Green 148 

{From the " Short History of the English People.'''') 

EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND. By John Richard Green . 153 
{From the " Short History of the English People.'''') 

ROBERT BRUCE. By Sir Archibald Alison 157 

{From ^^ Essays.") 

EDWARD III, KING OF ENGLAND. By David Hume . . .163 

{From the " History of England.''^) 

RIENZL By Edward Gibbon 167 

(From the ^^ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^) 

TIMOUR OR TAMERLANE. By Edward Gibbon . . . .173 
{From the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'''') 

JEANNE D'ARC. By John Richard Green 180 

{From the " Short History of the English People.'''') 

MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED IL By Edward Gibbon . . .186 
{From the " H'lstory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'") 

LORENZO DE' MEDICI. By John Addington Symonds . . .190 

{From the " Italian Renaissance?'') 

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA. By John Addington Symonds . .195 

{From the " Italian Renaissance?'') 

C^SAR BORGIA. By Charles Yriarte ...... 201 

{From " CcEsar Borgia?'') 

CARDINAL WOLSEY. By John Richard Green . . . .208 
{From the " Short History of the English People?') 

FRANCISCO PIZARRO.* By William Hickling Prescott . .211 

{From the " Conqtcest of Peru.'') 

HERNANDO CORTES. By William Hickling Prescott . .216 
{From the " History of the Conquest of Mexico.") 

* This and the succeeding selection from the works of Prescott are included by kind 
permission of Messrs. Lippincott «& Co. 



^••| CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

MARTIN LUTHER. By Thomas Carlyle 222 

{From the " Life of Martin Luthery) 

IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA (SAINT), FOUNDER OF THE ORDER 

OF JESUS. By Sir James Stephen 230 

{From " StepherCs Essays.'''* 

THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX. By John Richard Green 235 
{From the " Short History of the English Peopled) 

CHARLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY.* By John Lothrop 

Motley 240 

{From the ^^ Rise of the Dutch Republic.'''') 

WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE. By John Lothrop 

Motley 248 

{From the " Rise of the Dutch Republic:'') 

JOHN KNOX. By James Anthony Froude 255 

{From the " History of England.'') 

DUKE OF ALVA. By John Lothrop Motley 259 

{From the " Rise of the Dutch Republic.'') 

QUEEN ELIZABETH. By John Richard Green . . . .265 
{From the " Short History of the English People.") 

MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. By David Hume . . .275 

{From the ''History of England.") 

JOHN PYM. By John Richard Green 280 

{From the " Short History of the English People.") 

HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE. By John Lothrop Motley . . 284 
{From the " History of the United Netherlands." ) 

WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND. By Friedrich von 

Schiller 291 

{From the " History of the TJiirty Years' War.") 

CARDINAL RICHELIEU. By Sir James Stephen . . . .299 
{From the ''^ Lectures on the History of France.") 

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN. By Friedrich von 

Schiller 303 

{From the " History of the Tliirty Years' War.") 

* This and other selections from the works of Motley are included»by kind permis- 
sion of Messrs. Harper & Brothers. 



CONTENTS, ix 

PAGE 

EARL OF STRAFFORD. By David Hume 310 

{From the " History of England.'''') 

OLIVER CROMWELL. By Thomas Babington Macaulat . .315 

{From the " History of England^) 

LORD HALIFAX. By Thomas Babington Macaulat . . .322 

{From the History of '■^ Englandy) 

LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE. By Thomas Babington Macaulat . . 327 

{From '^ Essay s^) 

WILLIAM in OF ENGLAND. By Thomas Babington Macaulat . 329 

{From the " History of England.^') 

PETER THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA. By Thomas Babington 

Macaulat 339 

{From the " History of England:') 

DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. By William E. H. Leckt . . .344 
{From the ^^ History of England in the Eighteenth Century:'') 

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. By William E. H. Leckt . . .351 
{From the " History of England in the Eighteenth Century:'') 

FREDERICK THE GREAT. By Thomas Carltle . . . .357 
{From the '''■Life of Frederick the Great:'') 

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM. By John Richard Green . 364 
{From the '•* Short History of the English People:'') 

EDMUND BURKE. By William E. H. Leckt 369 

{From the " History of England in the Eighteenth Century:'') 

GEORGE WASHINGTON. By William E. H. Leckt . . .378 
{From the " History of England in the Eighteenth Century:'') 

MIRABEAU. By Thomas Carltle 384 

{From CarlyWs'' Essays:') 

CHARLES JAMES FOX. By William E. H. Leckt . . .389 
{From the " History of England in the Eighteenth Century:'') 

JEAN PAUL MARAT. By Hippoltte Adolphe Taine . . .396 

{From the " French Revolution:'') 

PRINCE TALLEYRAND. By Archibald Alison • . . .400 

{From the " History of Europe:'') 

GEORGE JACQUES DANTON. By Hippoltte Adolphe Taine . 405 

{From the '''■French Revolution:'') 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

ROBESPIERRE. By Hippolyte Adolphe Taixe . . . .410 

{From the " French Revolution.'''') 

WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER. By John Richard Green . .417 
{From tJie ^^ Short History of the English PcopUy) 

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. By Louis Adolphe Thiers . . .423 
{From the '•'■ History of the Consulate and Empire^) 

DUKE OF WELLINGTON. By Archibald Alison . . . .432 

{From tJie ^''History of Europey) 



LIST OF ENGRAVED PORTRAITS. 



face page 
Pericles 6 

{From antique bust, copy in the British Museum.) 
Alexander the Great 14 

{From antique bust.) 
Hannibal 20 

{Fi'om, antique gem.) 
Julius C^sar 49 

{From antique statue, Rome.) 
Mohammed 92 

{From old print, likeness traditional.) 
Charlemagne 100 

{From old line engraving.) 
Alfred the Great 107 

{From old line engraving.) 
William the Conqueror 120 

{Copy of painting from an ancient effigy.) 
Martin Luther 222 

{From painting by Cranach.) 
Ignatius de Loyola 230 

{From portrait by Rubens.) 
Charles V 240 

{From portrait by Titian.) 

William of Nassau 248 

Richelieu 299 

{From line engraving by Nantenil.) 

Oliver Cromwell 315 

Peter the Great 339 

{From line engraving by Petrus Anderloni.) 
Frederick the Great . 357 



GREAT LEADERS. 



THEMISTOCLES AND AEISTIDES. 

Br GEOKGE GROTE. 

[Athenian statesmen and soldiers, the first named bom 514 b. c, 
died about 449 ; the second, surnamed " the Just," died about 468 b. 
c, date of birth unknown. During the Persian invasions of Greece, 
Themistocles was the most brilliant figure among the Greek leaders ; 
his genius was omnipresent, his resources boundless. He created the 
maritime supremacy of Athens, and through him the great victory of 
Salamis was won. His political ascendency was finally lost through the 
distrust created by his unscrupulous and facile character, and he died 
an exile in Persia, intriguing against his native land. Aristides, less 
brilliant than his rival, was famous for the stainless integrity and up- 
rightness of his public life, and his name has passed into history as the 
symbol of unswerving truth and justice. He also contributed largely 
to the successful leadership of the Hellenic forces against their Asiatic 
invaders. References : Plutarch's " Lives," Grote's " History of 
Greece," Curtius's " History of Greece."] 

Neither Themistocles nor Aristides could boast of a 
lineage of gods and heroes like the ^acid Miltiades ; * both 
were of middling station and circumstances. Aristides, son 
of Lysimachus, was on both sides of pure Athenian blood. 
But the wife of Neocles, father of Themistocles, was a for- 
eign woman of Thrace or Caria ; and such an alliance is the 

* Miltiades claimed descent from ^acus, the fabled son of Jupi- 
ter, father of Peleus and Telamon, and grandfather of Achilles and 
Ajax the Greater, the chiefs of the Greek heroes before Troy. — G. T. F. 
1 



2 GREAT LEADERS. 

less surprising since Themistocles must have been born in 
the time of the Peisistratids,* when the status of an Athenian 
citizen had not yet acquired its political value. There was 
a marked contrast between these two eminent men — those 
points which stood most conspicuous in one being compara- 
tively deficient in the other. 

In the description of Themistocles, which we have the 
advantage of finding briefly sketched by Thucydides, the cir- 
cumstance most emphatically brought out is his immense 
force of spontaneous invention and apprehension, without 
any previous aid either from teaching or actual practice. 
The might of unassisted nature was never so strikingly ex- 
hibited as in him; he conceived the complications of a 
present embarrassment and divined the chances of a mys- 
terious future with equal sagacity and equal quickness. 
The right expedient seemed to flash on his mind extempore^ 
even in the most perplexing contingencies, without the least 
necessity for premeditation. 

Nor was he less distinguished for daring and resource 
in action. When engaged on any Joint affairs his superior 
competence marked him out as the leader for others to fol- 
low ; and no business, however foreign to his experience, 
ever took him by surprise or came wholly amiss to him. 
Such is the remarkable picture which Thucydides draws of 
a countryman whose death nearly coincided in time with 
his own birth. The untutored readiness and universality of 
Themistocles probably formed in his mind a contrast to the 
more elaborate discipline and careful preliminary study with 
whigh the statesmen of his own day — and Pericles specially 
the greatest of them — approached the consideration and 
discussion of public affairs. Themistocles had received no 
teaching from philosophers, sophists, and rhetors, who were 
the instructors of well-born youth in the days of Thu- 

* Peisistratos was the tyrant of Athens, the overthrow of whose 
family, about 510 b. c, laid the foundation of the Athenian democ- 
racy.— G. T. F. 



TMEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES. 3 

cydides, and whom Aristophanes, the contemporary of the 
latter, so unmercifully derides — treating such instruction as 
worse than nothing, and extolling in comparison with it 
the unlettered courage, the more gymnastic accomplish- 
ments of the victors at Marathon. 

The general character given in Plutarch, though many 
of his anecdotes are both trifling and apocryphal, is quite 
consistent with the brief sketch just cited from Thu- 
cydides. Themistocles had an unbounded passion, not 
merely for glory — insomuch as the laurels of Miltiades 
acquired at Marathon deprived him of rest — but also for 
display of every kind. He was eager to vie with men richer 
than himself in showy exhibition — one great source, though 
not the only source of popularity at Athens ; nor was he at 
all scrupulous in procuring the means of doing it. Besides 
being scrupulous in attendance on the ecclesia and dicas- 
tery, he knew most of the citizens by name, and was always 
ready for advice to them in their private affairs. Moreover, 
he possessed all the tactics of the expert party-man in con- 
ciliating political friends and in defeating personal enemies ; 
and though in the early part of his life sincerely bent upon 
the upholding and aggrandizement of his country, and was 
on some most critical occasions of unspeakable value to it, 
yet on the whole his morality was as reckless as his intelli- 
gence was eminent. 

He was grossly corrupt in the exercise of power and em- 
ploying tortuous means, sometimes, indeed, for ends in them- 
selves honorable and patriotic, but sometimes also merely 
for enriching himself. He ended a glorious life by years of 
deep disgrace, with the forfeiture of all Hellenic esteem and 
brotherhood — a rich man, an exile, a traitor, and a pen- 
sioner of the Great King, pledged to undo his own previous 
work of liberation accomplished at the victory of Salamis. 

Of Aristides, unfortunately, we possess no description 
from the hand of Thucydides ; yet his character is so simple 
and consistent that we may safely accept the brief but un- 



4 GREAT LEADERS. 

qualified encomium of Herodotus and Plato, expanded as 
it is in the biography of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, 
however little the details of the latter can be trusted. Aris- 
tides was inferior to Themistocles in resource, quickness, 
flexibility, and power of coping with difficulties ; but incom- 
parably superior to him — as well as to other rivals and con- 
temporaries — in integrity, public as well as private ; inac- 
cessible to pecuniary temptation as well as to other seductive 
influences, and deserving as well as enjoying the highest 
measure of personal confidence. 

He is described as the peculiar friend of Clisthenes, the 
first founder of the democracy ; as pursuing a straight and 
single-handed course in political life, with no solicitude for 
party-ties, and with little care either to conciliate friends or 
to offend enemies ; as unflinching in the exposure of cor- 
rupt practices by whomsoever committed or upheld ; as 
earning for himself the lofty surname of the Just, not less 
by his judicial decisions in the capacity of archon, than by 
his equity in private arbitrations, and even his candor in 
public dispute ; and as manifesting throughout a long pub- 
lic life, full of tempting opportunities, an uprightness with- 
out a flaw and beyond all suspicion, recognized equally by 
his bitter contemporary the poet Timocreon, and by the 
allies of Athens, upon whom he first assessed the tribute. 

Few of the leading men in any part of Greece were with- 
out some taint on their reputation, deserved or undeserved, 
in regard to pecuniary probity ; but whoever became noto- 
riously recognized as possessing this vital quality, acquired 
by means of it a firmer hold on the public esteem than 
even eminent talents could confer. Thucydides ranks con- 
spicuous probity among the first of the many ascendant 
qualities possessed by Pericles ; and Nicias, equal to him in 
this respect, though immeasurably inferior in every other, 
owed to it a still larger proportion of that exaggerated con- 
fidence which the Athenian people continued so long to 
repose in him. 



THEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES, 5 

The abilities of Aristides, though apparently adequate to 
every occasion on which he was engaged, and only inferior 
when we compare him with so remarkable a man as Thu*— 
. cydides, were put in the shade by this incorruptible probity, 
which procured for him, however, along with the general 
esteem, no inconsiderable amount of private enmity from 
jobbers, whom he exposed, and even some jealousy from 
persons who heard it proclaimed with offensive osten- 
tation. 

We are told that a rustic and unlettered citizen gave his 
ostracizing vote and expressed his dislike against Aristides 
on the simple ground that he was tired of hearing him 
always called the Just. Now the purity of the most honor- 
able man will not bear to be so boastfully talked of, as if 
he were the only honorable man in the country ; the less it 
is obtruded the more deeply and cordially will it be felt ; 
and the story just alluded to, whether true or false, illus- 
trates that natural reaction of feeling produced by absurd 
encomiasts or perhaps by insidious enemies under the mask 
of encomiasts, who trumpeted for Aristides as the Just man 
at Attica so as to wound the legitimate dignity of every 
one else. 

Neither indiscreet friends nor artful enemies, however, 
could rob him of the lasting esteem of his countrymen, 
which he enjoyed with intervals of their displeasure to the 
end of his life. Though he was ostracized during a part of 
the period between the battles of Marathon and Salamis — at 
a time when the rivalry between him and Themistocles was 
so violent that both could not remain at Athens without 
peril — ^yet the dangers of Athens during the invasion of 
Xerxes brought him back before the ten years of exile were 
expired. His fortune, originally very moderate, was still 
further diminished during the course of his life, so that he 
died very poor, and the state was obliged to lend aid to his 
children. 



6 GREAT LEADERS. 

PERICLES. 

By EENST CUKTIUS. 

[A distinguished statesman, who built up and consolidated the 
power of Athens immediately after the Persian wars, born 495 b. c, 
died 429. His career was contemporaneous with the highest glory of 
Athens in art, arms, literature, and oratory. As an orator Pericles 
was second only to Demosthenes, as a statesman second to none. Ref- 
erences : Grote's " History of Greece," Curtius's " History of Greece," 
Plutarch's " Lives," Bulwer's " Athens."] 

AsPASiA came to Athens when everything new and ex- 
traordinary, everything which appeared to be an enlarge- 
ment of ancient usage, a step forward and a new acquisition, 
was joyously welcomed. Nor was it long before it was rec- 
ognized that she enchanted the souls of men by no mere 
arts of deception of which she had learned the trick. Hers 
was a lofty and richly endowed nature with a perfect sense 
of all that is beautiful, and hers a harmonious and felicitous 
development. For the first time the treasures of Hellenic 
culture were found in the possession of a woman surrounded 
by the graces of her womanhood — a phenomenon which all 
men looked on with eyes of wonder. She was able to con- 
verse with irresistible grace on politics, philosophy, and art, 
so that the most serious Athenians — even such men as Soc- 
rates — sought her out in order to listen to her conversation. 

But her real importance for Athens began on the day 
when she made the acquaintance of Pericles, and formed 
with him a connection of mutual love. It was a real mar- 
riage, which only lacked the civil sanction because she was 
a foreigner ; it was an alliance of the truest and tenderest 
affection which death alone dissolved — the endless source of 
a domestic felicity which no man needed more than the 
statesman, who lived retired from all external recreations 
and was unceasingly engaged in the labors of his life. 



PERICLES. 7 

Doubtless the possession of this woman was in many 
respects invahiable for Pericles. Not only were her accom- 
plishments the delights of the leisure hours which he allowed 
himself and the recreation of his mind from its cares, but 
she also kept him in intercourse with the daily life around 
him. She possessed what he lacked — the power of being per- 
fectly at ease in every kind of society ; she kept herself in- 
formed of everything that took place in the city ; nor can 
distant countries have escaped her attention, since she is said 
to have first acquainted Pericles with Sicilian oratory, which 
was at that time developing itself. 

She was of use to him through her various connections 
at home and abroad as well as by the keen glance of her 
feminine sagacity and by her knowledge of men. Thus the 
foremost woman of her age lived in the society of the man 
whose superiority of mind had placed him at the head of 
the first city of the Hellenes, in loyal devotion to her friend 
and husband ; and although the mocking spirits at Athens 
eagerly sought out every blemish which could be discovered 
in the life of Pericles, yet no calumny was ever able to vilify 
this rare union and to blacken its memory. 

Pericles had no leisure for occupying himself with the 
management of his private property. He farmed out his 
lands and intrusted the money to his faithful slave Evange- 
lus, who accurately knew the measure which his master 
deemed the right one, and managed the household accord- 
ingly ; which, indeed, presented a striking contrast to those 
of the wealthy families of Athens, and ill corresponded to 
the tastes of Pericles's sons as they grew up. For in it there 
was no overflow, no joyous and reckless expenditure, but so 
careful an economy that everything was calculated down to 
drachm and obolus. 

Pericles was perfectly convinced that nothing short of a 
perfectly blameless integrity and the severest self-abnegation 
could render possible the permanency of his influence over 
his fellow-citizens and prevent the exposure of even the 



8 GREAT LEADERS. 

smallest blot to his cavilers and enemies. After Themisto- 
cles had for the first time shown how a statesman and gen- 
eral might enrich himself, Pericles was in this respect the 
admirer and most faithful follower of Aristides, and in the 
matter of conscientiousness went even much further than 
Cimon, spurning on principle every opportunity offered by 
the office of general for a perfectly justifiable personal en- 
richment. 

All attempts to bribe him remained useless. His lofty 
sentiments are evidenced by the remark which he addressed 
to Sophocles, who fell in love even in his old age : " Not 
only the hands, but the eyes also of a general should prac- 
tice continence." The more vivid the appreciation he felt 
for female charms the more highly must we esteem the 
equanimity to which he had attained by means of a self- 
command which had become a matter of habit with him ; 
nor did anything make so powerful an impression upon the 
changeable Athenians as the immovable calm of this great 
man. 

Pericles was neither a lengthy nor a frequent speaker. 
He avoided nothing more scrupulously than superfluous 
words, and therefore as often as he appeared before the 
people he prayed to Zeus to guard him from useless words. 
But the brief words which he actually spoke made a propor- 
tionately deep impression upon the citizens. His conception 
of his calling was too solemn and lofty to permit him to con- 
sent to talk as the multitude liked. He was not afraid when 
he found the citizens weak and irresolute to express to them 
bitter truths and serious blame. 

His speeches always endeavored to place every case in 
connection with facts of a more general kind, so as to in- 
struct and elevate the minds of the citizens ; he never grew 
weary of pointing out how no individual happiness was con- 
ceivable from the welfare of the entire body ; he proved to 
the citizens the claim which he had established upon their 
confidence ; he clearly and concisely developed his political 



PERICLES. 9 

views, endeavoring not to talk over his hearers, but to con- 
vince them ; and when the feeling of his own superiority 
was about to tempt him to despise the multitude, he admon- 
ished himself to be patient and long suffering. " Take 
heed, Pericles," he cried to himself, " those whom thou rul- 
est are Hellenes, citizens of Athens." 

The principles of the statesmanship of Pericles were so 
simple that all citizens were perfectly capable of understand- 
ing them ; and he attached a particular value to the idea 
that the Athenians instead of, like the Lacedaemonians, 
seeking their strength in an affectation of secrecy, were un- 
willing to overcome their enemies by deception and cunning 
stratagems. As the Persian war had seemed inevitable to 
Themistocles, so the struggle with Sparta loomed as certain 
before the eyes of Pericles. The term of peace allowed be- 
fore its outbreak had accordingly to be employed by Athens 
in preparing herself for the struggle awaiting her forces. 
When at last the critical hour arrived Athens was to stand 
before her assailants firm and invincible, with, her walls for 
a shield and her navy for a sword. 

The long schooling through which Pericles had passed 
in the art of war and the rare combination of caution and 
energy which he had displayed in every command held by 
him had secured him the confidence of the citizens. There- 
fore they for a succession of years elected him general, and 
as such invested him with an extraordinary authority, 
which reduced the offices of the other nine generals to mere 
posts of honor which were filled by persons agreeable to 
him. During the period of his administration the whole 
centers of gravity of public life lay in this office. 

Inasmuch as Pericles, besides the authority of a " strategy " 
prolonged to him in an extraordinary degree, also filled the 
office of superintendent of the finances ; inasmuch as he 
was repeatedly and for long periods of years superintendent 
of public works ; inasmuch as his personal influence was so 
great that he could in all important matters determine the 



10 GREAT LEADERS. 

civic elections according to his wish ; it is easy to under- 
stand how he ruled the state in time of war and peace, 
and how the power of both the council and of the whole 
civic body in all essentials passed into his hands. 

He was the type of temperance and sobriety. He made 
it a rule never to assist at a festive banquet ; and no Athe- 
nian could remember to have seen Pericles, since he stood at 
the head of the state, in the company of friends over the 
wine-cup. He was known to no man except as one serious 
and collected, full of grave thoughts and affairs. His whole 
life was devoted to the service of the state, and his power 
accompanied by so thorough a self-denial and so full a 
measure of labor that the multitude in its love of enjoy- 
ment could surely not regard the possession of that power 
as an enviable privilege. For him there existed only one 
road, which he was daily seen to take, the road leading 
from his house to the market-place and the council-hall, 
the seat of the government, where the current business of 
state was transacted. 



EPAMmONDAS. 

By EENST CUETIUS. 

[The greatest of the Theban generals and statesmen, and one of 
the greatest men of antiquity ; born about 418 b. c, killed on the 
battle-field of Mantinea in the hour of victory, 362. He raised Thebes 
from a subordinate place to the leadership of Greece by his genius 
in arms and wisdom in council. Eminent as soldier, statesman, and 
orator, Epaminondas was a model of virtue in his private life, and 
was not only devoted to his native republic, but in the largest sense a 
Greek patriot. References : Grote's " History of Greece," Curtius's 
" History of Greece," Plutarch's " Lives." 

It would be difficult to find in the entire course of Greek 
history any two statesmen who, in spite of differences in 
character and outward conditions of life, resembled one 



EPA31IN0NDAS. H 

another so greatly and were as men so truly the peers of 
one another as Pericles and Epaminondas. In the case of 
both these men the chief foundation of their authority was 
their lofty and varied mental culture ; what secured to them 
their intellectual superiority was the love of knowledge 
which pervaded and ennobled the whole being of either. 
Epaminondas like Pericles directs his native city as the 
man in whom the civic community places supreme confi- 
dence, and whom it therefore re-elects from year to year 
as general. Like Pericles, Epaminondas left no successor 
behind him, and his death was also the close of an histori- 
cal epoch. 

Epaminondas stood alone from the first ; and while Peri- 
cles with all his superiority yet stood essentially on the basis 
of Attic culture, Epaminondas, on the other hand, was, so to 
speak, a stranger in his native city. Nor was it ever his 
intention to be a Theban in the sense in which Pericles was 
an Athenian. The object of his life was rather to be a per- 
fect Hellene, while his efforts as a statesman were likewise 
simply an endeavor to introduce his fellow-citizens to that 
true Hellenism which consisted in civic virtue and in love 
of wisdom. 

In the very last hour of his life, when he was delighted 
by the preservation of his shield, he showed himself a genu- 
ine Hellene ; thus again it was a genuinely Greek stand- 
point from which he viewed the war against Sparta and 
Athens as a competitive contest for the honor of the hegem- 
ony in Hellas, an honor which could only be justly won 
by mental and moral superiority. The conflict was inevit- 
able ; it had become a national duty, because the supremacy 
of Sparta had become a tyranny dishonorable to the Hellenic 
nation. After Epaminondas liberated the Greek cities from 
the Spartan yoke it became the object of his Boeotian patri- 
otism to make his own native city worthy and capable of 
assuming the direction. 

How far Epaminondas might have succeeded in securing 



12 GREAT LEADERS. 

a permanent hegemony * over Greek affairs to the Thebans 
who shall attempt to judge ? He fell in the full vigor of 
his manhood on the battle-field where the states, which 
withstood his policy, had brought their last resources to 
bear. Of all statesmen, therefore, he is least to be judged 
by the actual results of his policy. His greatness lies in 
this — that from his childhood he incessantly endeavored to 
be to his fellow-citizens a model of Hellenic virtue. Chaste 
and unselfish he passed, ever true to himself, through a 
most active life, through all the temptations of the most 
unexampled success in war, through the whole series of 
trials and disasters. 

Epaminondas was not merely the founder of a military 
organization. He equally proved the inventiveness of 
his mind in contriving to obtain for his country, which 
was wealthy neither by trade nor manufactures, pecuniary 
resources sufiicient for maintaining a land-army and a war- 
navy commensurate with the needs of a great power. He 
made himself master of all the productive ideas of earlier 
state administrations; and in particular the Athenians 
naturally stood before his eyes as models and predecessors. 

On the one hand, he turned to account for his native city 
the improvements made in arms and tactics, which were due 
4 / to Xenophon, Ohabrias, and Iphicrates ; on the other, the 
/ example of the Athenians taught him that the question of 
the hegemony over Greece could only be settled by sea. 
Finally, Epaminondas, more than any other Greek states- 
man, followed in the footsteps of Periclean Athens in re- 
garding the public fostering of art and science as a main 
duty of that state which desired to claim a position of pri- 
macy. 

Personally he did his utmost to domesticate philosophy 
at Thebes, not only as intellectual discourse carried on in 



* The leadership in a league or confederation, as to-day it may be 
said Prussia possesses the " hegemony " of Germany.— G. T. F. 



EPAMINONDAS. 13 

select circles, but as the power of higher knowledge which 
elevates and purifies the people. Public oratory found a 
home at Thebes, together with the free constitution ; and 
not only did Epaminondas personally prove himself fully 
the equal of the foremost orators in Athens — of Callis- 
tratus in particular — in power of speech and in felicitous 
readiness of mind, but, as the embassy at Susa shows, his 
friends too learned in a surprisingly short time to assert the 
interests of Thebes by the side of the other states, which 
had long kept up foreign relations with vigor, skill, and 
dignity. 

In every department there were perceptible intellect- 
ual mobility and vigorously sustained effort. Of the fine 
arts painting received a specially successful development, 
distinguished by a thoughtful and clear treatment of intel- 
lectual ideas. Of the architecture of this period honorable 
evidence is to this day given by the well-preserved remains 
of the fortifications of Messene, constructed under the direc- 
tion of Epaminondas — tjrpical specimens of architecture con- 
structed in the grandest style. Plastic art likewise found a 
home at Thebes. It was the endeavor of Epaminondas — 
although with prudent moderation — to transfer the splendor 
of Periclean Athens to Thebes. 

Through Epaminondas Thebes was raised to an equality 
with the city of the Athenians, as a seat of a policy aiming 
at freedom and national greatness. It thus became possible 
for the two cities to join hands in the subsequent struggle 
for the independence of Greece. And, in this sense, Epami- 
nondas worked beforehand for the objects of Demosthenes. 
If it is considered how, with his small resources, Epaminon- 
das founded or helped to found Mantinea, Messene, and 
Megalopolis ; how through him other places, such as Corone 
and Heraclea, likewise received Theban settlers — the honor 
will not be denied him of having been in the royal art of 
the foundation of cities the predecessor of Alexander and 
his successors. 



14: GREAT LEADERS. 

But he was also their predecessor in another point. By 
spreading Greek manners and ways of life he enlarged the 
narrow boundaries of the land of the Greeks, and intro- 
duced the peoples of the North into the sphere of Greek 
history. In his own person he represented the ideas of a 
general Hellenic character, which, unconditioned by local 
accidents, was freely raised aloft above the distinction of 
states and tribes. Hitherto only great statesmen had ap- 
peared who were great Athenians or Spartans. In Epami- 
nondas this local coloring is of quite inferior importance ; 
he was a Hellene first, and a Theban only in the second 
place. Thus he prepared the standpoint from which to be 
a Hellene was regarded as an intellectual privilege, inde- 
pendent of the locality of birth ; and this is the standpoint 
of Hellenism. 



ALEXANDEE THE GREAT. 

By GEOKGE GEOTE. 

[Son of Philip, King of Macedon, bom 356 b. c, died 323. The 
greatest of the world's conquerors in the extent and rapidity of his 
conquests, he began with the consolidation of his father's conquests 
over the republics of Greece, overthrew the great Persian Empire, and 
carried his arms to farther India, within a period of thirteen years. 
At his death his dominions were divided among his principal generals. 
References : Grote's " History of Greece," Curtius's " History of 
Greece," Plutarch's " Lives."] 

The first growth and development of Macedonia during 
the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Chaeronea, 
from an embarrassed secondary state into the first of all 
known powers, had excited the astonishment of contempo- 
raries and admiration for Philip's organizing genius ; but 
the achievements of Alexander during the twelve years of 
his reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a 




ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 



ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 15 

scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely without 
serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the 
measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of hu- 
man belief. All antecedent human parallels — the ruin and 
captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the expulsion and mean life 
of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive exam- 
ples of the mutability of human condition — sunk into trifles 
compared with the overthrow of the towering Persian Co- 
lossus. 

Such were the sentiments excited by Alexander's career 
even in the middle of 330 b. c, more than seven years before 
his death. During the following seven years his additional 
achievements had carried astonishment yet further. He 
had mastered, in defiance of fatigue, hardship, and combat, 
not merely all the eastern half of the Persian Empire, but 
unknown Indian regions beyond its easternmost limits. 
Besides Macedonia, Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all that 
immense treasure and military force which had once made 
the Great King so formidable. By no contemporary man 
had any such power ever been known or conceived. With 
the turn of imagination then prevalent, many were doubt- 
less disposed to take him for a god on earth, as Grecian 
spectators had once supposed with regard to Xerxes, when 
they beheld the innumerable Persian host crossing the Hel- 
lespont. 

Exalted to this prodigious grandeur, Alexander was at 
the time of his death little more than thirty-two years old — 
the age at which a citizen of Athens was growing into im- 
portant commands ; ten years less than the age for a consul 
at Rome ; two years younger than the age at which Timour 
first acquired the crown and began his foreign conquests. 
His extraordinary bodily powers were unabated ; he had 
acquired a large stock of military experience; and, what 
was still more important, his appetite for further conquest 
was as voracious, and his readiness to purchase it at the 
largest cost of toil or danger as complete as it had been 



IQ GREAT LEADERS. 

when he first crossed the Hellespont. Great as his past ca- 
reer had been, his future achievements with such increased 
means and experience were likely to be yet greater. His 
ambition would have been satisfied with nothing less than 
the conquest of the whole habitable world as then known ; 
and, if his life had been prolonged, he probably would have 
accomplished it. 

The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain 
that Alexander, had he invaded Italy and assailed Eomans 
and Samnites, would have failed and perished like his rela- 
tive Alexander of Epirus. But this conclusion can not be 
accepted. If we grant the courage and discipline of the 
Roman infantry to have been equal to the best infantry of 
Alexander's army, the same can not be said of the Roman 
cavalry as compared with the Macedonian companions. 
Still less is it likely that a Roman consul, annually changed, 
would have been a match for Alexander in military genius 
and combination ; nor, even if personally equal, would he 
have possessed the same variety of troops and arms, each 
effective in its separate way, and all conspiring to one com- 
mon purpose ; nor the same unbounded influence over their 
minds in stimulating them to full effort. 

Among all the qualities which go to constitute the high- 
est military excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, 
none was wanting in the character of Alexander. Together 
with his own chivalrous courage — sometimes, indeed, both 
excessive and unseasonable, so as to form the only military 
defect which can be fairly imputed to him — we trace in all 
his operations the most careful dispositions taken before- 
hand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible re- 
verse, and abundant resource in adapting himself to new 
contingencies. His achievements are the earliest recorded 
evidence of scientific military organization on a large scale, 
and of its overwhelming effects. 

Alexander overawes the imagination more than any other 
personage of antiquity by the matchless development of all 



ALEXANDER TEE GREAT. 17 

that constitutes effective force — as an individual warrior and 
as organizer and leader of armed masses ; not merely the 
blind impetuosity ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the 
intelligent, methodized, and all-subduing compression which 
he personifies in Athene. But all his great qualities were 
fit for use only against enemies, in which category, indeed, 
were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except 
those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian cam- 
paigns amid tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not 
only those who stand on their defense, but also those who 
abandon their property and flee to the mountains are alike 
pursued and slaughtered. 

Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a 
general, some authors give him credit for grand and benefi- 
cent views on the subject of imperial government and for 
intentions highly favorable to the improvement of mankind. 
I see no ground for adopting this opinion. As far as we 
can venture to anticipate what would have been Alexander's 
future, we see nothing in prospect except years of ever re- 
peated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded till he 
had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The 
acquisition of universal dominion — conceived not meta- 
phorically but literally, and conceived with greater facility 
in consequence of the imperfect geographical knowledge of 
the time — was the master-passion of his soul. 

" You are a man like all of us, Alexander, except that 
you abandon your home," said the naked Indian to him, 
"like a medlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant 
regions; enduring hardship yourself and inflicting hardship 
on others." Now, how an empire thus boundless and hete- 
rogeneous, such as no prince as has yet ever realized, could 
have been administered with any superior advantages to 
subjects, it would be difficult to show. The mere task of 
acquiring and maintaining, of keeping satraps and tribute- 
gatherers in authority as well as in subordination, of sup- 
pressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by 



18 GREAT LEADERS. 

months of march, would occupy the whole life of a world 
conquerer, without leaving any leisure for the improvements 
suited to peace and stability — if we give him credit for such 
purposes in theory. 

In respect of intelligence and combining genius, Alex- 
ander was Hellenic to the full ; in respect of disposition and 
purpose, no one could be less Hellenic. The acts attesting 
his Oriental violence of impulse, unmeasured self-will, and 
exaction of reverence above the limits of humanity, have been 
recounted. To describe him as a son of Hellas, imbued with 
the political maxims of Aristotle, and bent on the system- 
atic diffusion of Hellenic culture for the improvement of 
mankind is in my judgement an estimate of his character 
contrary to the evidence. 

Alexander is indeed said to have invited suggestions 
from Aristotle as to the best mode of colonizing ; but his 
temper altered so much after a few years of Asiatic conquest, 
that he came not only to lose all deference for Aristotle's 
advice, but even to hate him bitterly. Instead of " Hellen- 
izing " Asia, he was tending to " Asiatize " Macedonia and 
Hellas. His temper and character as modified by a few 
years of conquest rendered him quite unfit to follow the 
course recommended by Aristotle toward the Greeks — quite 
as unfit as any of the Persian kings, or as the French 
Emperor Napoleon, to endure that partial frustration, com- 
promise, and smart from personal criticism, which is in- 
separable from the position of a limited chief. 

Plutarch states that Alexander founded more than 
seventy new cities in Asia. So large a number of them is 
neither verifiable nor probable, unless we either reckon up 
simple military posts or borrow from the list of founda- 
tions established by his successors. Except Alexandria in 
EgyP^? i^one of the cities founded by Alexander himself 
can be shown to have attained any great development. The 
process of " Hellenizing " Asia, in as far as Asia was ever 
" Hellenized," which has so often been ascribed to Alex- 



HANNIBAL. I9 

ander, was in reality the work of the successors to his great 
dominion. 

We read that Alexander felt so much interest in the ex- 
tension of science that he gave to Aristotle the immense sum 
of eight hundred talents in money, placing under his direc- 
tion several thousand men, for the purpose of prosecuting 
zoological researches. These exaggerations are probably the 
work of those enemies of the philosopher who decried him 
as a pensioner of the Macedonian court ; but it is probable 
enough that Philip, and Alexander in the earlier part of his 
reign, may have helped Aristotle in the difficult process of 
getting together facts and specimens for observation from 
esteem toward him personally rather than from interest in 
his discoveries. 

The intellectual turn of Alexander was toward literature, 
poetry, and history. He was fond of the " Iliad " especially, 
as well as of the Attic tragedians ; so that Harpalus, being 
directed to send some books to him in Upper Asia, selected 
as the most acceptable packet various tragedies of -^schy- 
lus, Sophocles, and Euripides, with the dithyrambic poems 
of Telestes and the histories of Philistus. 



HANNIBAL. 

By THEODOE MOMMSEN. 

[A Carthaginian statesman and soldier, one of the foremost gener- 
als of antiquity, born 247 b. c, died 183. The series of Italian cam- 
paigns in which he imperiled the very existence of Rome are com- 
mented on by modern military critics as models of brilliancy and 
daring, combined with far-sighted prudence. Finally compelled to 
evacuate Italy, he was defeated and his army destroyed by Publius 
Cornelius Scipio, afterward surnamed Africanus, at the battle of 
Zama in Africa in 202. Exiled from Carthage, he spent the latter 
years of his life in fomenting war against Rome among the Eastern 
nations, and finally committed suicide to prevent being delivered over 



20 GREAT LEADERS. 

to the hands of Rome. References : Mommsen's " History of Rome," 
Plutarch's " Lives."] 

When" Hamilcar departed to take command in Spain, 
he enjoined his son Hannibal, nine years of age, to swear at 
the altar of the Supreme God eternal hatred to the Roman 
name, and reared him. and his younger sons, Hasdrubal and 
Mago — the " lion's brood," as he called them — in the camp, 
as the inheritors of his projects, of his genius, and of his 
hatred. 

The man whose head and heart had in a desperate emer- 
gency and amid a despairing people paved the way for 
their deliverance, was no more when it became possible to 
carry out his design. "Whether his successor Hasdrubal for- 
bore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed 
to him not yet to have arrived, or whether, a statesman 
rather than a general, he believed himself unequal to the 
conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. 
When, at the beginning of 219 B. c, he fell by the hand of 
an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army 
summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Ha- 
milcar. 

He was still a young man, born in 247 B. c, and now, there- 
fore, in his twenty-ninth year ; but his life had already been 
fraught with varied experience. His first recollections pict- 
ure to him his father fighting in a distant land and con- 
quering on Ercte ; he shared that unconquered father's 
fortunes and sympathized with his feelings on the peace 
of Catulus, on the bitter return home, and throughout the 
horrors of the Libyan war. While still a boy he had fol- 
lowed his father to the camp, and he soon distinguished 
himself. 

His light and firmly built frame made him an excellent 
runner and boxer and a fearless rider ; the privation of sleep 
did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy 
or to want his food. Although his youth had been spent in 




HANNIBAL. 



HANNIBAL. 



21 



the camp, he possessed such culture as was bestowed on the 
noble Phoenicians of the time ; in Greek, apparently after 
he had become a general, he made such progress under the 
guidance of his intimate friend Sasilus of Sparta as to be 
able to compose state papers in that language. 

As he grew up, he entered the army of his father to per- 
form his first feats of arms under the paternal eye, and to 
see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he had com- 
manded the cavalry under his sister's husband Hasdrubal 
and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as 
well as by his talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades 
now summoned him— their tried and youthful leader— to 
the chief command, and he could now execute the designs 
for which his father and his brother-in-law had died. 

He took possession of the inheritance, and was worthy of 
it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of all sorts on his 
character ; the Komans charged him with cruelty, the Car- 
thaginians with covetousness ; and it is true that he hated as 
only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general 
who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have 
been other than covetous. Nevertheless, though anger and 
envy and meanness have written his history, they have not 
been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents. 

Laying aside wretched inventions which furnished their 
own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants Han- 
nibal Monomachus, and Mago the Samnite, were guilty of 
doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding 
him which may not be justified in the circumstances and 
by the international law of the times ; and all agree in this — 
that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthu- 
siasm, caution and energy. 

He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness 
which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician 
character — he was fond of taking singular and unexpected 
routes ; ambushes and strategems of all sorts were familiar 
to him ; and he studied the character of his antagonists with 



22 ^ GREAT LEADERS. 

unprecedented care. By an unrivaled system of espionage 
— he had regular spies even in Rome — he kept himself in- 
formed of the projects of the enemy ; he himself was fre- 
quently seen wearing disguises and false hair in order to 
procure information on some point or another. 

Every page of history attests his genius as a general ; 
and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, 
no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Car- 
thaginian constitution and in the unparalleled influence 
which as an exiled strength he exercised in the cabinets of 
the Eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men 
is shown by his incomparable control over an army of vari- 
ous nations and many tongues — an army which never in the 
worst times mutinied against him. He was a great man ; 
wherever he went he riveted the eyes of all. 

Hannibal's cautious and masterly execution of his plan 
of crossing the Alps into Italy, instead of transporting his 
army by sea, in its details, at all events, deserves our admi- 
ration, and, to whatever causes the result may have been due 
— whether it was due mainly to the favor of fortune or mainly 
to the skill of the general — the grand idea of Hamilcar, 
that of taking up the conflict with Rome in Italy, was now 
realized. It was his genius that projected the expedition ; 
and the unerring tact of historical tradition has always 
dwelt on the last link in the great chain of preparatory 
steps, the passage of the Alps, with a greater admiration 
than on the battles of the Trasimene Lake and of the plain 
of Cannae. 

Hannibal knew Rome better, perhaps, than the Romans 
knew it themselves. It was clearly apparent that the Italian 
federation was in political solidity and in military resources 
far superior to an adversary who received only precarious 
and irregular support from home ; and that the Phoenician 
foot-soldier was, notwithstanding all the pains taken by 
Hannibal, far inferior in point of tactics to the legionary, 
had been completely proved by the defensive movements of 



THE GRACCHI. 23' 

Scipio. From these convictions flowed two fundamental 
principles which determined Hannibal's whole method of 
operations in Italy, viz., that the war should be carried on 
somewhat adventurously, with constant changes in the 
plan and in the theatre of operations ; and that its favor- 
able issue could only be looked for as the result of political 
and not of military successes — of the gradual loosening and 
breaking up of the Italian federation. 

This aim was the aim dictated to him by right policy, 
because mighty conqueror though he was in battle, he saw 
very clearly that on each occasion he vanquished the gener- 
als but not the city, and that after each new battle, the 
Eomans remained as superior to the Carthaginians as he 
was personally superior to the Roman commanders. That 
Hannibal, even at the height of his fortune, never deceived 
himself on this point is a fact more wonderful than his 
wonderful battles. 



THE GKACCHI. 

By PLUTAECH. 

[Tiberius Sempronius and Caius Sempronius, sons of Tiberius 
Gracchus by Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, the conqueror 
of Hannibal and Carthage. The first, born 168 b. c, died in 133 ; the 
second, born about 159 b. c, died in 121. The brothers, though on 
both sides of the highest patrician rank and descent, espoused the 
democratic cause. Both rose to the rank of tribune. Tiberius car- 
ried through an agrarian law dividing the surplus lands of the repub- 
lic among the poor, and was killed in a popular emeute, Caius 
caused to be passed a poor-law giving monthly distributions of corn. 
He also transferred the judicial power largely to the equites or 
knights, and proposed to extend the Roman franchise to all Italy. He 
ocmmitted suicide to save himself from assassination. References: 
Arnold's " History of Rome " and " Moramsen's " History of Rome." 

CoRi^ELiA, taking upon herself the care of the household 
and the education of her children, approved herself so 



24 . GREAT LEADERS. 

discreet a matron, so affectionate a mother, and so constant 
and noble-spirited a woman, that Tiberius seemed to all 
men to have done nothing unreasonable in choosing to die 
for such a woman, who, when King Ptolemy himself prof- 
fered her his crown and would have married her, refused it 
and chose rather to live a widow. In this state she continued 
and lost all her children, except one daughter, who was mar- 
ried to Scipio the younger, and two sons, Tiberius and Caius. 

These she brought up with such care, that though they 
were without dispute in natural endowments and disposi- 
tion the first among the Eomans of their day, yet they 
seemed to owe their virtues even more to their education 
than to their birth. And, as in the statues and pictures 
made of Castor and Pollux, though the brothers resemble 
one another, yet there is a difference to be perceived in their 
countenances between the one who delighted in the cestus, 
and the other that was famous in the course ; so between 
these two youths, though there was a strong general like- 
ness in their common love of fortitude and temperance, in 
their liberality, their eloquence, and their greatness of mind, 
yet in their actions and administrations of public affairs, a 
considerable variation showed itself. 

Tiberius, in the form and expression of his countenance 
and in his gesture and motion, was gentle and composed ; 
but Caius, earnest and vehement. And so in their public 
speeches to the people, the one spoke in a quiet, orderly 
manner, standing throughout on the same spot ; the other 
would walk about on the hustings and in the heat of his 
orations pull his gown off his shoulders, and was the first of 
all the Eomans to use such gestures. Caius's oratory was 
impetuous and passionate, making everything tell to the ut- 
most, whereas Tiberius was gentle and persuasive, awaken- 
ing emotions of pity. His diction was pure and carefully 
correct, while that of Caius was rich and vehement. 

So likewise in their way of living and at their tables ; 
Tiberius was frugal and plain, Caius, compared with others. 



THE GRACCHI. 25 

temperate and even austere, but contrasting with his 
brother in a fondness for new fashions and varieties. The 
same difference that appeared in their diction was observ- 
able also in their tempers. The one was mild and reason- 
able ; the other rough and passionate, and to that degree 
that often in the midst of speaking he was so hurried away 
by his passion against his judgment that his voice lost its 
tone and he began to pass into mere abusive talking, spoil- 
ing his whole speech. 

As a remedy to this excess he made use of an ingenious 
servant of his, one Licinius, who stood constantly behind 
him with a sort of pitch-pipe, or instrument to regulate the 
voice by, and whenever he perceived his master's tone alter 
and break with anger, he struck a soft note with his pipe, 
on hearing which Caius immediately checked the vehemence 
of his passion and his voice grew quieter, and he allowed 
himself to be recalled to temper. 

Such are the differences between the two brothers, but 
their valor in war against their country's enemies, their jus- 
tice in the government of its subjects, their care and indus- 
try in office, and their self-command in all that regarded 
their pleasures, were equally remarkable in both. Tiberius 
was the elder by nine years ; owing to which their actions 
as public men were divided by the difference of the times 
in which those of the one and those of the other were per- 
formed. The power they would have exercised, had they 
both flourished together, could scarcely have failed to over- 
come all resistance. 

Their greatest detractors and their worst enemies could 
not but allow that they had a genius to virtue beyond all 
other Eomans, which was improved also by a generous edu- 
cation. Besides, the Gracchi, happening to live when Rome 
had her greatest repute for honor and virtuous actions, 
might justly have been ashamed if they had not also left to 
the next generation the whole inheritance of the virtues of 
their ancestors. 
2 



26 GREAT LEADERS. 

The integrity of the two Eomans, and their superiority 
to money was chiefly remarkable in this — that in office and 
the administration of public affairs they kept themselves 
from the imputation of unjust gain. The chief things in 
general which they aimed at were the settlement of cities 
and mending the highways ; and in particular the boldest 
design which Tiberius is famed for is the recovery of the 
public land; and Caius gained his greatest reputation by 
the addition, for the exercise of judicial powers, of three 
hundred of the order of knights to the same number of sen- 
ators. 

Tiberius was the first who attempted to scale the walls 
of Carthage, which was no mean exploit. We may add the 
peace which he concluded with the Numantines, by which he 
saved the lives of twenty thousand Eomans, who otherwise 
had certainly been cut off. And Caius, not only at home, 
but in war in Sardinia, displayed distinguished courage. 
So that their early actions were no small argument that 
afterward they might have rivaled the best of the Eoman 
commanders if they had not died so young. 

Of the Gracchi, neither the one nor the other was the first 
to shed the blood of his fellow-citizens ; and Caius is report- 
ed to have avoided all manner of resistance, even when his 
life was aimed at, showing himself always valiant against a 
foreign enemy, but wholly inactive in a sedition. This was 
the reason that he went from his own house unarmed, and 
withdrew when the battle began, and in all respects showed 
himself anxious rather not to do any harm to others than 
not suffer any himself. Even the very flight of the Gracchi 
must not be looked on as an argument of a mean spirit, but 
an honorable retreat from endangering others. 

The greatest crime that can be laid to Tiberius's charge 
was the disposing of his fellow-tribune, and seeking after- 
ward a second tribuneship for himself. Tiberius and Caius 
by nature had an excessive desire for glory and honors. 
Beyond this, their enemies could find nothing to bring 



CAIUS MARIUS. 27 

against them; but as soon as the contention began with 
their adversaries, their heat and passions would so far pre- 
vail beyond their natural temper that by them, as by ill- 
winds, they were driven afterward to all their rash under- 
takings. What would be more just and honorable than 
their first design, had not the power and faction of the rich, 
by endeavoring to abrogate that law, engaged them both in 
those fatal quarrels, the one for his own preservation, the 
other to avenge his brother's death who was murdered 
without law or justice. 



CAIUS MAEIUS. 

By JAMES ANTHONY FEOUDE. 

[An able Roman general and leader of the democratic faction, born 
157 B. c, died 86. The military skill of Marius finished the Jugur- 
thine war and saved Rome from the Cimbri and Teutons. Though of 
plebeian birth he married into an eminent patrician family, and became 
thereby the uncle of Julius Cassar, who attached himself to the Marian 
party in the political wars which raged between the popular and pa- 
trician factions, the latter being led by Sylla. The worst stain on the 
memory of Marius is the massacre which he permitted at the begin- 
ning of his last consulate. References : Mommsen's " History of Rome," 
Froude's " Life of Caesar,", Plutarch's " Lives."! 

Marius was born at Arpinum, a Latin township, seventy 
miles from the capital. His father was a small farmer, and 
he was himself bred to the plow. He joined the army 
early, and soon attracted notice by the punctual discharge 
of his duties. In a time of growing looseness, Marius was 
strict himself in keeping discipline and in enforcing it as 
he rose in the service. He was in Spain when Jugurtha * 

* Jugurtha was a Numidian prince, who at one time served in the 
Roman armies. He afterward usurped the Numidian kingdom in 
Africa, and, after a tedious war, was subjugated by the Romans, 
brought to Rome, and starved in his dungeon. — G. T. F. 



28 GREAT LEADERS. 

was there, and made himself specially useful to Scipio ; * he 
forced his way steadily upward by his mere soldier-like 
qualities to the rank of military tribune. Kome, too, had 
learned to know him, for he was chosen tribune of the 
people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus. Being 
a self-made man, he naturally belonged to the popular party. 
While in office he gave offense in some way to the men in 
power, and was called before the senate to answer for him- 
self. But he had the right on his side, it is likely, for they 
found him stubborn and impertinent, and they could make 
nothing of their charges against him. 

He was not bidding, however, at this time for the sup- 
port of the mob. He had the integrity and sense to oppose 
the largesses of corn, and he forfeited his popularity by 
trying to close the public granaries before the practice had 
passed into a system. He seemed as if made of a block of 
hard Roman oak, gnarled and knotted but sound in all its 
fibers. His professional merit continued to recommend 
him. At the age of forty he became praetor, \ and was sent 
to Spain, where he left a mark again by the successful 
severity by which he cleared the provinces of banditti. 
He was a man neither given himself to talking nor much 
talked about in the world ; but he was sought for wherever 
work was to be done, and he had made himself respected 
and valued ; for after his return from the peninsula he had 
married into one of the most distinguished of the patrician 
families. 

Marius by this marriage became a person of social con- 
sequence. His father had been a client of the Metelli; 
and Csecelius Metellus, who must have known Marius by 
reputation and probably in person, invited him to go as 

* Publius Cornelius Scipio Afrieanus (Minor), the final destroyer of 
Carthage.— G. T. F. 

f A Roman magistrate, inferior to consul, appointed to rule a 
province. — G. T. F. 



CAIUS MAEIUS. 29 

second in command in the African campaign. * The war 
dragged on, and Marius, perhaps ambitious, perhaps impa- 
tient at the general's want of vigor, began to think he could 
make quicker work of it. There was just irritation that a 
petty African prince could defy the whole power of Rome 
for so many years; and though a democratic consul had 
been unheard of for a century, the name of Marius began 
to be spoken of as a possible candidate. Marius consented 
to stand. The patricians strained their resources to defeat 
him, but he was chosen with enthusiasm. 

A shudder of alarm ran, no doubt, through the senate 
house when the determination of the people was known. 
A successful general could not be disposed of as easily as 
oratorical tribunes. Fortunately Marius was not a politi- 
cian. He had no belief in democracy. He was a soldier 
and had a soldier's way of thinking on government and the 
methods of it. His first step was a reformation in the army. 
Hitherto the Roman legions had been, no more than the 
citizens in arms, called for the moment from their various 
occupations to return to them when the occasion for their 
services was past. Marius had perceived that fewer men, 
better trained and disciplined, could be made more effective 
and be more easily handled. He had studied war as a 
science. He had perceived that the present weakness need 
be no more than an accident, and that there was a latent 
force in the Roman state which needed only organization 
to resume its ascendancy. 

" He enlisted," it was said, " the worst of the citizens " — 
men, that is to say, who had no occupation, and became 
soldiers by profession; and as persons without property 
could not have furnished themselves at their own cost, he 
must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, 
and equipped them at the expense of the state. His dis- 
cipline was of the sternest. The experiment was new ; and 

* The war against Jugurtha. 



30 GREAT LEADERS, 

men of rank who had a taste for war in earnest, and did not 
wish that the popular party should have the whole benefit 
and credit of the improvements were willing to go with 
him ; among them a dissipated young patrician, called Lu- 
cius Sylla, whose name was also destined to be memorable. 

Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy 
from being totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave 
of population had been set in motion behind the Rhine and 
Danube. The hunting-grounds were too strait for the 
numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were 
rolling westward and southward in search of some new 
abiding-place. The Teutons came from the Baltic down 
across the Rhine into Luxemburg. The Cimbri crossed the 
Danube near its sources into Illyria. Both Teutons and 
Cimbri were Germans, and both were making for Gaul by 
different routes. Each division consisted of hundreds of 
thousands. They traveled with their wives and children, 
their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians and with the 
modern South African Dutch, being their homes. Two 
years had been consumed in these wanderings, and Marius 
was by this time ready for them. 

Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time 
consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the 
army was now a professional service with regular pay. 
Trained corps of engineers were attached to each legion. 
The campaigns of the Romans were henceforth to be con- 
ducted with spade and pickaxe as well as with sword and 
javelin, and the soldiers learned the use of tools as well as 
of arms. The Teutons were destroyed on the twentieth of 
July, 102 B. c. In the year following the same fate over- 
took their comrades. The victories of Marius mark a new 
epoch in Roman history. The legions were no longer the 
levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves the state 
for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still. 
They had votes and they used them ; but they were profes- 
sional soldiers with the modes of thought which belong to 



CAIUS 3IA1UUS. 31 

soldiers, and besides the power of the hustings was now the 
power of the sword. 

The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than 
political anarchy broke loose again. Marius, the man of the 
people, was the savior of his country. He was made a con- 
sul a fifth time, and then a sixth. An indifferent politician, 
however, he stood aloof in the fierce faction contest between 
the aristocrats and the popular party. At last he had al- 
most withdrawn from public life, as he had no heart for the 
quarrel, and did not care to exert his power. For eight 
years both he and his rival Sylla kept aloof from politics 
and were almost unheard of. 

When Sylla came to the front, it was as leader of the 
aristocratic power in the state. Sulpicius Rufus, once a 
champion of the senate and the most brilliant orator in 
Rome, went over to the people, and as tribune demanded 
the deposition of Sylla. The latter replied by leading his 
legionaries to Rome. Sulpicius was killed ; Marius, the sav- 
ior of his country, had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, 
with a price set upon his head. 

While Sylla was absent in the East prosecuting that 
magnificent campaign against Mithridates, King of Pontus, 
which stamped him the first soldier of his time, the popular 
party again raised its head. Old Marius, who had been 
hunted through marsh and forest, and had been hiding 
with difficulty in Africa, came back at the news that Italy 
had risen again. Marius and Cinna joined their forces, ap- 
peared together at the gates of the capital, and Rome capitu- 
lated. There was a bloody score to be wiped out. Marius 
bears the chief blame for the scenes which followed. A 
price had been set on his head, his house had been de- 
stroyed, his property had been confiscated, he, himself, 
had been chased like a wild beast, and he had not de- 
served such treatment. He had saved Italy, when but for 
him it would have been wasted by the swords of the 
Germans. 



32 GREAT LEADERS, 

His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not 
abused it for party purposes. The senate had no reason to 
complain of him. His crime in their eyes had been his 
eminence. They had now shown themselves as cruel as they 
were worthless ; and if public Justice was disposed to make an 
end of them, he saw no cause to interfere. From retaliatory 
political Tengeance the transition was easy to plunder and 
wholesale murder ; and for many days the wretched city 
was made a prey to robbers and cut- throats. 

So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which 
the guilty city had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna 
were chosen consuls for the ensuing year and a witch's 
prophecy was fulfilled that Marius should hold a seventh 
consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun 
was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived 
but a fortnight after his inauguration, and died in his bed 
at the age of seventy-one. " The mother of the Gracchi," 
said Mirabeau, " cast the dust of her murdered sons into the 
air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius." 



MITHEIDATES, KING OF PONTUS * 

By THEODOE MOMMSEN. 

[Surnamed " the Great," born about 132 b. c, died in 63. This 
powerful Eastern monarch, who greatly extended his frontiers beyond 
his original kingdom, was one of the most formidable barriers to Ro- 
man power in Asia. He organized a league and severely taxed the 
military resources of the republic. Sulla spent four years in compell- 
ing him to submit to an honorable peace. In the second Mithridatic 
war he was successively defeated by LucuUus and Pompey. He finally 

* This kingdom was situated in Asia Minor, on the southern and 
eastern shores of the Euxine "(Black) Sea, between Bithynia and Ar- 
menia. With the first-named region it constituted the extreme north- 
western portion of what is now Asiatic Turkey. — G, T. F. 



MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS. 33 

committed suicide by the hands of one of his mercenaries. References : 
Mommsen's " History of Rome," Arnold's " History of Rome."] 

Partly through the constant growth of oppression 
naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly 
through the indirect operation of the Roman revokition — 
in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the 
province of Asia by Caius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths 
and customs, and in the human hunts which the collectors 
of revenue added to their other avocations there — the Roman 
.ule, barely tolerable from the first, pressed so heavily on 
Asia, that neither the king's crown nor the peasant's hut 
there was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk 
of corn seemed to grow for Roman tribute, and every child 
of free parents seemed born for the Roman slave-driver. 

It is true that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his 
inexhaustible passive endurance ; but it was not patience or 
reflection that made him bear it peacefully. It was rather 
the peculiarly Oriental want of power to take the initiative ; 
and in these peaceful lands, among these effeminate na- 
tions, strange and terrible things might happen if once there 
should appear among them a man who knew how to give 
the signal for revolt. 

There reigned at that time in the kingdom of Pontus 
Mithridates VI, surnamed Eupator, who traced back his 
lineage on the father's side, in the sixteenth generation to 
King Darius, son of Hystaspes, in the eighth to Mithridates 
I, the founder of the Pontic Empire, and was on the mother's 
side descended from the Alexandridas and the Seleucidae. 
After the early death of his father, Mithridates Euergetes, 
who fell by the hand of an assassin at Synope, he had re- 
ceived the title of king when a boy of eleven years old ; but 
the diadem had only brought to him trouble and danger. 
It is said that in order to escape from the daggers of his 
legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer ; 
and during seven years, changing his resting-place night 



34 GREAT LEADERS. 

after night, a fugitive in liis own kingdom, led the life of 
a lonely hunter. 

Thus the boy grew into a mighty man. Although our 
accounts regarding him are in substance traceable to written 
records of contemporaries, yet the legendary tradition, which 
is generated with the rapidity of lightning in the East, 
early adorned the mighty king with many of the traits of its 
Samson and Eustem. These traits, however, belong to his 
character just as the crown of clouds belong to the highest 
mountain peaks ; the outline of the figure appears in both 
cases only more colored and fantastic, not disturbed or es- 
sentially altered. 

The armor which fitted the gigantic frame of King 
Mithridates excited the wonder of the Asiatics, and still 
more that of the Italians. As a runner he overtook the 
swiftest deer ; as a rider he broke in the wildest steed, and 
was able by changing horses to accomplish one hundred 
and twenty miles in a day ; as a charioteer he drove with 
sixteen in hand, and gained in competition many a prize — 
it was dangerous, no doubt, in such sport to carry off victory 
from the king. 

In hunting on horseback he hit the game at full gallop, 
and never missed his aim. He challenged competition at 
the table also; he arranged banqueting matches and carried 
off in person the prizes proposed for the most substantial 
eater and the hardest drinker. His intellectual wants he 
satisfied by the wildest superstition — the intei3)retation of 
dreams and of the Greek mysttmes occupied not a few of 
the king's hours— and by a rude adoption of the Hellenic 
civilization. He was fond of Greek art and music — that is 
to say, he collected precious articles, rich furniture, old 
Persian and Greek articles of luxury — his cabinet of rings 
was famous — he had constantly Greek historians, philoso- 
phers, and poets in his train ; and proposed prizes at his 
court festivals, not only for the greatest eaters and drinkers, 
but also for the merriest jester and the best singer. 



MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS. 35 

Such was tlie man ; the sultan corresponded. In the 
East, where the relation between the ruler and the ruled 
bears the relation of natural rather than of moral law, the 
subject resembles the dog alike in fidelity and in falsehood, 
the ruler is cruel and distrustful. In both respects Mithri- 
dates has hardly been surpassed. By his orders there died 
or pined in perpetual captivity, for real or alleged treason, 
his mother, his brother, his sister espoused to him, three of 
his sons, and as many of his daughters. Still more revolt- 
ing, perhaps, is the fact that among his secret papers were 
found sentences of death, drawn up beforehand, against 
his most confidential servants. 

In like manner it was a genuine trait of the sultan that 
he afterward, for the mere purpose of depriving his enemy 
of trophies of victory, caused his whole harem to be killed, 
and distinguished his favorite concubine, a beautiful Ephe- 
sian, by allowing her to choose the mode of death. He 
prosecuted the experimental studies of poisons and anti- 
dotes as an important branch of the business of govern- 
ment, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. He 
had early learned to look for treason and assassination at 
the hands of everybody, especially his nearest relations, and 
he had early learned to practice them against everybody, and 
most of all against those nearest him ; of which the neces- 
sary consequence — attested by history — was that all his 
undertakings finally miscarried through the perfidy of those 
whom he trusted. 

At the same time we meet with isolated traits of high- 
minded justice. When he punished traitors, he ordinarily 
spared those who were involved in the crime solely through 
their personal relations with the leading culprits ; but such 
fits of equity are to be met with in every barbarous tyrant. 
What really distinguishes Mithridates amid the multitude 
of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared 
one fine morning from his palace, and remained unheard of 
for months, so that he was given over as lost; when he 



36 , GREAT LEADERS. 

refeurned, he had wandered mcognito through all anterior 
Asia, and reconnoitered everywhere the country and the 
people. 

In like manner he was not only generally fluent in 
speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty- 
two nations over which he ruled in its own language, with- 
out needing an interpreter — a trait significant of the versa- 
tile East. His whole activity as a ruler bears the same char- 
acter. So far as we know, his energies, like those of every 
other sultan, were spent in collecting treasures, in assem- 
bling armies — which were usually, in his earlier years at least, 
led against the enemy not by the king in person, but by 
some Greek condottiere — in efforts to add new satrapies to 
the old. 

Of higher elements — desire to advance civilization, 
earnest leadership of the national opposition, special gifts 
of genius — there are found, in our traditional accounts at 
least, no distinct traces in Mithridates, and we have no rea- 
son to place him on a level even with the great rulers of the 
Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwith- 
standing his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much 
better than his Eoman armor on his Cappadocians, he was 
throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full 
of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, 
and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so pow- 
erful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about 
him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look 
like talent, sometimes even like genius. 

Granting even that during the death-struggle of the re- 
public it was easier to offer resistance than in the times of 
Scipio or Trajan, and that it was only in the complication 
of the Asiatic events with the internal commotions of Italy 
that rendered it possible for Mithridates to resist the Ro- 
mans twice as long as Jugurtha did, it nevertheless remains 
true that before the Parthian war he was the only enemy 
who gave serious trouble to the Romans in the East, and 



LUCIUS SYLLA. 37 

that he defended himself as the lion of the desert defends 
himself against the hunter. 

But whatever judgment we may form as to the individ- 
ual character of the king, his historical position remains in 
a high degree significant. The Mithridatic wars formed at 
once the last movement of the political opposition offered 
by Hellas to Eome and the beginning of a revolt against 
the Roman supremacy resting on very different and far 
deeper grounds of antagonism — the national reaction of the 
Asiatics against the Occidentals, a new passage in the huge 
duel between the West and the East which has been trans- 
mitted from the struggle of Marathon to the present gener- 
ation, and will, perhaps, reckon its future by thousands of 
years as it has reckoned its past. 



LUCIUS SYLLA. 

By JAMES ANTHONY FEOUBE. 

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla or Sylla (Felix) dictator of Rome ,born 138 
B. c, died in 78. Leader of the aristocratic party in the state, he de- 
stroyed the party of popular reform, became dictator, and proscribed 
thousands of the best citizens of the republic, who were hunted down 
like wild beasts. In the Social and the Samnite war, as in the first war 
against Mithridates, he displayed the genius of a great soldier, sur- 
passing even that of his able rival Marius. He reorganized the 
Roman Constitution, concentrated all power in the hands of the sena- 
torial oligarchy, and paved the way for Julius Caesar to overthrow the 
liberties of the republic, though the latter belonged to the opposite 
party. References : Fronde's " Life of Cassar," Plutarch's " Lives," 
Mommsen's " History of Rome."] 

Lucius Sylla, a patrician of the purest blood, had in- 
herited a moderate fortune, and had spent it like other 
young men of rank, lounging in theatres and amusing 
himself with dinner-parties. He was a poet, an artist, and 
a wit, but each and everything with the languor of an 



38 GUEAT LEADERS. 

amateur. His favorite associates were actresses, and he had 
neither obtained nor aspired to any higher reputation than 
that of a cultivated man of fashion. 

His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person. 
He had red hair, hard bkie eyes, and a complexion white and 
purple, with the colors so ill-mixed, that his face was com- 
pared to a mulberry sprinkled with flour. Ambition, he 
appeared to have none, and when he exerted himself to be 
appointed quaestor * to Marius on the African expedition, 
Marius was disinclined to take him as having no recom- 
mendation beyond qualifications which the consul of the 
plebeians disdained and disliked. Marius, however, soon 
discovered his mistake. Beneath his constitutional indo- 
lence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a diplomatist. 
He had been too contemptuous of the common objects of 
politicians to concern himself with the intrigues of the 
forum, but he had only to exert himself to rise with easy 
ascendancy to the command of every situation in which he 
might be placed. 

The war of factions which exiled Marius, placed Sylla 
at the head of the expedition against the King of Pontus. 
He defeated Mithridates, he drove him back out of Greece 
and pursued him into Asia. He left him still in possession 
of his hereditary kingdom ; but he left him bound, so far 
as treaties could bind so ambitious a spirit, to remain 
thenceforward on his own frontiers. He recovered Greece, 
the islands, and the Eoman provinces in Asia Minor. He 
extorted an indemnity of five millions, and executed many 
of the wretches who had been active in the murders. He 
raised a fleet in Egypt with which he drove the pirates out 
of the archipelago back into their own waters. He re- 
stored the shattered prestige of Eoman authority, and he 

* The office charged with financial administration. A military 
praetor was at the head of the pay and commissary department. — 
G. T. F. 



LUCIUS SYLLA. 39 

won for himself a reputation which his later cruelties could 
stain but not efface. During his Eastern campaign, a period 
of more than four years, the popular party had recovered 
ascendancy at Rome. 

The time was come when Sylla was to demand a reckon- 
ing for what had been done in his absence. No Roman 
general had deserved better of his country ; his task was 
finished. He had measured the difficulty of the task which 
lay before him, but he had an army behind him accus- 
tomed to victory, and recruited by thousands of exiles who 
had fled from the rule of the democracy. He intended to 
re-enter Rome with the glories of his conquests about him, 
for revenge, and a counter-revolution. Sylla had lingered 
at Athens, collecting paintings and statues and manuscripts 
— the rarest treasures on which he could lay his hands — to 
decorate his Roman palace. On receiving the consul's 
answer he sailed for Brindisi in the spring of 83 with 
forty thousand legionaries and a large fleet. 

The war lasted for more than a year. At length the 
contest ended in a desperate fight under the walls of Rome 
itself on the first of November, B. c, 82. The popular army 
was at last cut to pieces, a few thousand prisoners taken, 
but they were murdered afterward in cold blood. Young 
Marius killed himself. Sertorius fled to Spain, and Sylla 
and the aristocracy were masters of Rome and Italy. Sylla 
was under no illusions. He understood the problem which 
he had in hand. He knew that the aristocracy were de- 
tested by nine tenths of the people ; he knew that they 
deserved to be detested, but they were at least gentlemen by 
birth and breeding. 

The democrats, on the other hand, were insolent up- 
starts who, instead of being grateful for being allowed to 
live and work and pay taxes and serve in the army, had 
dared to claim a share in the government, had turned 
against their masters, and had set their feet upon their necks. 
They were ignorant, and without leaders could be controlled 



40 GIl,EAT LEADERS. 

easily. The guilt and danger lay witli the men of wealth 
and intellect, the country gentlemen, the minority of knights 
and patricians like Cinna,* who had taken the popular side 
and deserted their own order. There was no hope for an 
end of agitation till every one of these men had been rooted 
out. 

Appointed dictator, at his own direction, by the senate, 
he at once outlawed every magistrate, every public servant, 
civil or municipal, who had held office under the rule of 
Cinna. It mattered little to Sylla who were included if 
none escaped who were really dangerous to him; and an 
order was issued for a slaughter of the entire number, the 
confiscation of their property, and the division of it between 
the informers and Sylla's friends and soldiers. It was one 
of those deliberate acts, carried out with method and order, 
which are possible only in countries in an advanced stage of 
civilization, and which show how thin is the film spread 
over human ferocity by what is called progress and culture. 
Four thousand seven hundred persons fell in the proscrip- 
tion of Sylla, all men of education and fortune. Common 
report or private information was at once indictment and 
evidence, and accusation was in itself condemnation. 

The political reform enforced by the dictator gave the 
senate complete restrictive control over legislation and ad- 
ministration. All constitutional progress which had been 
made in the interests of the people was utterly swept away. 
The senate was made omnipotent and irresponsible. Sylla's 
career was drawing to its close, and the end was not the least 
remarkable feature of it. He resigned the dictatorship and 
became a private citizen again, amusing the leisure of his 
age, as he had abused the leisure of his youth, with theatres 
and actresses and dinner-parties. 

He too, like so many of the great Romans, was indiffer- 
ent to life ; of power for the sake of power he was entirely 

* Publius Cornelius Cinna, consul from 86 b. c. to 83. — G. T. F. 



POMPEY. 41 

careless ; and if his retirement had been more dangerous to 
him than it really was, he probably would not have post- 
poned it. He was a person of singular character, and not 
without many qualities which were really admirable. He 
was free from any touch of charlatanry. He was true, sim- 
ple, and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean 
and personal sense. His fault, which he would have de- 
nied to be a fault, was that he had a patrician disdain of 
mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty. 

The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but 
Graham of Claverhouse in a Roman dress and with an 
ampler stage. His courage in laying down his authority 
has often been commented on, but the risk which he in- 
curred was insignificant. Of assassination he was in no 
greater danger than when dictator, while the tempta- 
tion to assassinate him was less. His influence was prac- 
tically undiminished, and as long as he lived he remained, 
and could not but remain, the first person in the republic. 
He lived a year after his retirement and died 78 B. c, being 
occupied at the time in writing his memoirs, which have 
been unfortunately lost. He was buried gorgeously in the 
Campus Martins, among the old kings of Eome. 



POMPEY. 

By THOMAS KEKCHEVER ARNOLD. 

[Known as Cneiiis Pompeius Magnus (or the Great), born 106 b. c, 
assassinated in Egypt by one of his own officers in 48. Best known as 
the most formidable rival of Julius Caesar ; his career was eminently 
fortunate till he sunk before the ascendancy of a greater man. He 
achieved brilliant victories for Rome, and was honored with three 
triumphs. Pompey was identified in the factional wars of Italy, 
with the party led by Sulla. He finally became triumvir in the division 
of power with Ca;sar and Crassus. In the civil war which ensued 



42 GREAT LEADERS. 

Pompey was defeated by Caesar at the battle of Pharsalia in Thessaly. 
After this defeat he fled to Egypt, where, as he was leaving the boat 
for the shore, he was stabbed in the back.] 

The tears shed for Pompey were not only those of do- 
mestic infliction ; his fate called forth a more general and 
honorable mourning. No man had ever gained at so early 
an age the affections of his countrymen ; none had enjoyed 
them so largely, or preserved them so long with so little 
interruption ; and at the distance of eighteen centuries the 
feeling of his contemporaries may be sanctioned by the sober 
judgment of history. 

He entered upon life as a distinguished member of an 
oppressed party, which was just arriving at its hour of tri- 
umph and retaliation ; he saw his associates plunged into 
rapine and massacre, but he preserved himself pure from 
the contagion of their crimes; and when the death of 
Sylla left him almost at the head of the aristocratical party, 
he served them ably and faithfully with his sword, while 
he endeavored to mitigate the evils of their ascendancy by 
restoring to the commons of Eome, on the earliest oppor- 
tunity, the most important of those privileges and liberties 
which, they had lost under the tyranny of their late master. 

He received the due reward of his honest patriotism in 
the unusual honors and trusts that were conferred on him ; 
but his greatness could not corrupt his virtue; and the 
boundless powers with which he was repeatedly invested he 
wielded with the highest ability and uprightness to the 
accomplishment of his task, and then, without any undue 
attempts to prolong their duration, he honestly resigned 
them. At a period of general cruelty and extortion toward 
the enemies and subjects of the commonwealth, the charac- 
ter of Pompey in his foreign commands was marked by its 
humanity and spotless integrity. 

His conquest of the pirates was effected Avith wonderful 
rapidity, and cemented by a merciful policy, which, instead 
of taking vengeance for the past, accomplished the preven- 



P03IPEY. 43 

tion of evil for the future. His presence in Asia, when he 
conducted the war with Mithridates, was no less a relief to 
the provinces from the tyranny of their governors, than it 
was their protection against the arms of the enemy. It is 
true that wounded vanity led him, after his return from 
Asia, to unite himself for a time with some unworthy associ- 
ates; and this connection, as it ultimately led to all his 
misfortunes, so did it immediately tempt him to the worst 
faults of his political life, and involved him in a career of 
difficulty, mortification, and shame. 

But after this disgi'aceful fall, he again returned to his 
natural station, and was universally regarded as the fit 
protector of the laws and liberties of his country when 
they were threatened by Ci3ssar's rebellion. In the conduct 
of the civil war he showed something of weakness and 
vacillation ; but his abilities, though considerable, were far 
from being equal to those of his adversary. His inferiority 
was most seen in that want of steadiness in the pursuit of 
his own plans which caused him. to abandon a system al- 
ready sanctioned by success, and to persuade himself that he 
might yield with propriety to the ill-judged impatience of 
his followers for battle. 

His death is one of the few tragical events of those 
times which may be regarded with unmixed compassion. 
It was not accompanied, like that of Cato and Brutus, with 
the rashness and despair of suicide ; nor can it be regarded 
like that of Caesar, as the punishment of crimes, unlaw- 
fully inflicted, indeed, yet suffered deservedly. With a 
character of rare purity and tenderness in his domestic re- 
lations, he was slaughtered before the eyes of his wife and 
son ; while flying from the ruin of a most just cause he 
was murdered by those whose kindness he was entitled to 
claim. 

His virtues have not been transmitted to posterity with, 
their deserved fame; and while the violent republican 
writers have exalted the memory of Cato and Brutus ; while 



44: GREAT LEADERS. 

the lovers of literature have extolled Cicero ; and the ad- 
mirers of successful ability have lavished their praises on 
Caesar ; Pompey's many and rare merits have been forgotten 
in the faults of his triumvirate, and in the weakness of 
temper which he displayed in conduct of the last cam- 
paign. 

But he must have been in no ordinary degree good and 
amiable for whom his countrymen professed their enthusi- 
astic love, unrestrained by servility and unimpelled by fac- 
tion; and though the events of his life must now be 
gathered for the most part from unfriendly sources, yet 
we think that they who read them impartially will continu- 
ally cherish his memory with a warmer regard. 



SEETOEIUS. 

By PLUTAECH. 

[Quintus Sertorius, a Roman general of Sabine extraction, born 
about 121 B. c, assassinated in Spain in 72. A prominent chief of the 
Marian party, he fled to Spain and held possession of the province 
against the dominant party at Home for more than ten years. He was 
the one leader among the adherents of Marius, as Pompey was the 
one general among the followers of Sylla, who showed moderation and 
the spirit of clemency. His greatness was chiefly shown in his career 
in Spain. He displayed consummate generalship and skill in holding 
all the armies of Rome at bay till he was assassinated by one of his 
own ofiicers.] 

Sertokius at last utterly despaired of Rome, and hast- 
ened into Spain, that by taking possession there beforehand 
he might secure a refuge to his friends from their misfor- 
tunes at home. He armed all the Romans who lived in 
those countries that were of military age, and undertook 
the building of ships and the making of all sorts of war- 
like engines, by which means he kept the cities in due 
obedience, showing himself gentle in all peaceful business, 



SERTORIUS. 45 

and at the same time formidable to his enemies by his great 
preparations for war. 

When Sertorius was called to Mauritania to assist the 
enemies of Prince Ascalis, and had made himself absolute 
master of the whole country, he acted with great fairness 
to those who had confided in him, and who yielded to his 
mercy. He restored to them their property, cities, and 
government, accepting only of such acknowledgments as 
they themselves freely offered. While he considered which 
way next to turn his arms, the Lusitanians sent ambassa- 
dors to desire him to be their general. For being terrified 
with the Eoman power, and finding the necessity of having 
a commander of great authority and experience in war ; 
being also sufficiently assured of his worth and valor by 
those who formerly had known him, they were desirous to 
commit themselves specially to his care. 

In fact, Sertorius is said to have been of a temper un- 
assailable either by fear or pleasure, in adversity and dangers 
undaunted, and no ways puffed up with prosperity. In 
straightforward fighting no commander of his time was more 
bold and daring ; and in whatever was to be performed in 
war by stratagem, secrecy, or surprise, if any strong place 
was to be secured, any pass to be gained speedily, for de- 
ceiving and overreaching an enemy, there was no man equal 
to him in subtlety and skill. 

In bestowing rewards and conferring honors upon those 
who had performed good service in the wars he was bounti- 
ful and magnificent, and was no less sparing and moderate 
in inflicting punishment. The Lusitanians having sent for 
Sertorius, he left Africa, and being made general, with 
absolute authority, he put all in order among them, and 
brought the neighboring parts of Spain into subjection. 
Most of the tribes voluntarily submitted themselves, won by 
the fame of his clemency and of his courage ; and to some 
extent also, he availed himself of cunning artifices of his own 
devising to impose on them, and gain influence over them. 



46 GREAT LEADERS. 

Among which certainly that of the hind was not the 
least. Spanus, a countryman who lived in those parts, 
meeting by chance a hind that had recently calved flying 
from the hunters, let the dam go, and ]3ursuing the fawn 
took it, being wonderfully pleased with the rarity of the 
color, which was all milk white. At that time Sertorius 
was living in the neighborhood, and accepted gladly any 
presents of fruits, fowl, or venison that the country afforded, 
and rewarded liberally those who presented them. 

The countryman brought him his young hind, which he 
took and was well pleased with at first sight; but when 
in time he made it so tame and gentle that it would come 
when he called, and follow him wherever he went, and 
could endure the noise and tumult of the camp, knowing 
well that uncivilized people are naturally prone to supersti- 
tion, by little and little he raised it to something super- 
natural, saying it was given him by the goddess Diana, and 
that it revealed to him many secrets. 

If he had received private intelligence that the enemies 
had made an incursion into any part of the district under 
his command, or had solicited any city to revolt, he pre- 
tended that the hind had informed him of it in his sleep, 
and charged him to keep his forces in readiness. Or, again, 
if he had notice that any of the commanders under him had 
got a victory, he would hide the messengers and bring forth 
the hind crowned with flowers, for joy of the good news that 
was to come, and would encourage them to rejoice and sacri- 
fice to the gods for the good account they should soon re- 
ceive of their prosperous success. 

He was also highly honored for his introducing disci- 
pline and good order among them, for he altered their furi- 
ous mode of fighting, and brought them to make use of 
Roman armor, taught them to keep their ranks, and observe 
signals and watch-w^ords ; and out of a confused number of 
thieves and robbers he constituted a well-disciplined army. 
That which delighted them most, however, was the care he 



SERTORIUS. 47 

took of tlieir children. He sent for all the boys of noblest 
parentage out of all their tribes, and placed them in the 
great city of Osca, where he appointed masters to instruct 
them in the Latin and Greek learning. 

His method of conducting the war against the Romans 
showed his military skill and foresight. By rapidly assault- 
ing them, by alarming them on all sides, by ensnaring, cir- 
cumventing, and laying ambushes for them, he cut off all 
provisions by land, while with his piratical vessels he kept 
all the coast in awe and hindered their supplies by sea. He 
thus forced the Roman generals to dislodge and to separate 
from one another at the last ; Metellus departed into Gaul and 
Pompey wintered among the Vaccaeans in a wretched condi- 
tion, where, being in extreme want of money, he wrote a 
letter to the senate, to let them know that if they did not 
speedily supply him he must draw off his army. To these 
extremities the chiefest and most powerful commanders of 
the age were brought by the skill of Sertorius ; and it was 
the common opinion in Rome that he would be in Italy be- 
fore Pompey. 

Sertorius showed the loftiness of his temper in calling 
together all the Roman senators who had fled from Rome 
and had come and resided with him, giving them the name 
of a senate. Out of these he chose praetors and quaestors, and 
adorned his government with all the Roman laws and in- 
stitutions, and though he made use of the arms, riches, and 
cities of the Spaniards, yet he never would even in word 
remit to them the imperial authority, but set Roman officers 
and commanders over them, intimating his purpose to re- 
store liberty to the Romans, not to raise up the Spaniards' 
power against them. 

He was a sincere lover of his country and had a great 
desire to return home ; but in his adverse fortune he showed 
undaunted courage, and behaved himself toward his enemies 
in a manner free from all dejection and mean spirited ness. 
In his prosperity and the height of his victories he sent 



48 GREAT LEADERS. 

word to Metellus asid Pompey that he was ready to lay down 
his arms and lead a private life if he were allowed to return 
home, declaring that he had rather live as the meanest 
citizen in Eome than, exiled from it, be supreme com- 
mander of all other cities together. 

His negotiations with Mithri dates further argue the 
greatness of his mind. For when Mithridates, recovering 
himself from his overthrow by Sylla — like a strong wrestler 
that gets up to try another fall — was again endeavoring to re- 
establish his power in Asia, at this time the great fame of Ser- 
torius was celebrated in all places. Accordingly, Mithridates 
sends messengers into Spain with letters and instructions and 
commission to promise ships and money toward the charge 
of the war if Sertorius would confirm his pretensions on 
Asia, and authorize him to possess all that he had surren- 
dered to the Eomans in his treaty with Sylla. 

Sertorius would by no means agree to it ; declaring that 
King Mithridates should exercise all royal power and au- 
thority over Bithynia and Cappadocia — countries accustomed 
to a monarchical government and not belonging to Eome — 
but that he could never consent that he should seize or 
detain a province which, by the justest right and title, was 
possessed by the Eomans. For he looked upon it as his 
duty to enlarge the Eoman possessions by his conquering 
arms, and not to increase his power by the diminution of 
Eoman territories. 

When this was related to Mithridates he was struck 
with amazement, and said to his intimate friends : " What 
will Sertorius enjoin on us to do when he comes to be seated 
in the Palatium at Eome, who, at present, when he is 
driven out to the borders of the Atlantic Sea, sets bounds to 
our kingdoms in the East, and threatens us with war if we 
attempt the recovery of Asia ? " 




JULIUS C^SAR. 



JULIUS a^SAE. 49 

JULIUS CJESAR 

By JAMES ANTHONY FEOUDE. 

[A Roman general and statesman and founder of the empire, 
though its first ruler was Octavianus, his nephew and adopted son, 
who mounted the throne under the name of Augustus Caesar. Born 
100 B. c, assassinated in the senate-house 44 b. c. By many historians 
and critics Julius Caesar is regarded as the greatest man who lived be- 
fore the Christian era.] 

In person Cassar was tall and slight. His features were 
more refined than was usual in Eoman faces ; the forehead 
was wide and higli, the nose large and thin, the lips full, the 
eyes dark gray, like an eagle's, the neck extremely thick and 
sinewy. His complexion was pale. His beard and mus- 
tache were kept carefully shaved. His hair was short and 
naturally scanty, falling off toward the end of his life, 
and leaving him partially bald . His voice, especially when 
he spoke in public, was high and shrill. His health was 
uniformly good, until his last year jvhen he became subject 
to epileptic fits. 

He was a great bather, and scrupulously neat in his hab- 
its, abstemious in his food, and careless in what it consisted, 
rarely or never touching wine, and noting sobriety as the 
highest of qualities in describing any new people. He was 
an athlete in early life, admirable in all manly exercises, and 
especially in riding. From his boyhood it was observed of 
him that he was the truest of friends, that he avoided quar- 
rels, and was easily appeased when offended. In manner 
he was quiet and gentleman-like, with the natural courtesy 
of high breeding. 

Like Cicero, C^sar entered public life at the bar. It 

was by accident that he took up the profession of the soldier ; 

yet, perhaps, no commander who ever lived showed greater 

military genius. The conquest of Gaul was effected by a 

3 



50 GREAT LEADERS, 

force numerically insignificant, which was worked with the 
precision of a machine. The variety of uses to which it 
was capable of being turned implied, in the first place, ex- 
traordinary forethought in the selection of materials. Men 
whose nominal duty was merely to fight were engineers, ar- 
chitects, and mechanics of the highest order. In a few 
hours they could extemporize an impregnable fortress on 
the highest hill-side. They bridged the Ehine in a week. 
They built a fleet in a month. 

The legions at Alesia held twice their number pinned 
within their works, while they kept at bay the whole force 
of insurgent Gaul by scientific superiority. The machine, 
which was thus perfect, was composed of human beings who 
required supplies of tools and arms and clothes and food 
and shelter ; and for all these it depended on the forethought 
of its commander. Maps there were none. Countries en- 
tirely unknown had to be surveyed ; routes had to be laid 
out ; the depths and courses of rivers, the character of mount- 
ain-passes had all to be ascertained. Allies had to be found 
in tribes as yet unheard of. 

He was rash, but with a calculated rashness which the 
event never failed to justify. His greatest successes were 
due to the rapidity of his movements, which brought him to 
the enemy before they heard of his approach. No obstacles 
stopped him when he had a definite end in view. Again 
and again by his own efforts he recovered a day that was 
half lost. He once seized a panic-stricken standard-bearer, 
turned him around, and told him that he had mistaken the 
direction of the enemy. 

Yet he was singularly careful of his soldiers. He rarely 
fought a battle at a disadvantage. When a gallant action 
was performed, he knew by whom it had been done, and 
every soldier, however humble, might feel assured that if 
he deserved praise he would have it. The army was Cesar's 
family. In discipline, he was lenient to ordinary faults, and 
not careful to make curious inquiries into such things. He 



JULIUS C\^SAE. 51 

liked his men to enjoy themselves. Military mistakes in his 
officers he always endeavored to excuse, never blaming them 
for misfortunes unless there had been a defect of courage as 
well as of judgment. 

Cicero has said of Caesar's oratory that he surpassed 
those who had practiced no other art. His praise of him 
as a man of letters is yet more delicately and gracefully em- 
phatic. Most of his writings are lost; but there remain 
seven books of commentaries on the wars in Gaul (the 
eighth was added by another hand) ajid three books on the 
civil war, containing an account of its causes and history. 
Of these it was that Cicero said, in an admirable image, 
that fools might think to improve on them, but that no 
wise man would try it ; they were bare of ornament, the 
dress of style dispensed with, like an undraped human 
figure in all its lines as nature made it. In his composition, 
as in his actions, Ceesar is entirely simple. He indulges in 
no images, no labored descriptions, no conventional reflec- 
tions. His art is unconscious, as the highest art always is. 

Of Caesar it may be said that he came into the world at 
a special time and for a special object. The old religions 
were dead from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates 
and the Nile, and the principles on which human society 
had been constructed were dead also. There remained of 
spiritual conviction only the common and human sense of 
justice and morality ; and out of this sense some ordered 
system of government had to be constructed, under which 
quiet men could live and labor and eat the fruit of their 
industry. Under a rule of this material kind there can be 
no enthusiasm, no chivalry, no saintly aspirations, no patri- 
otism of the heroic type. It was not to last forever. A 
new life was about to dawn for mankind. 

Poetry and faith and devotion were to spring again out 
of the seeds which were sleeping in the heart of humanity. 
But the life which is to endure grows slowly ; and as the 
soil must be prepared before the wheat can be sown, so be- 



52 GREAT LEADERS. 

fore the Kingdom of Heaven could throw up its shoots, 
there was needed a kingdom of this world where the nations 
were neither torn in pieces by violence, nor were rushing 
after false ideals and spurious ambitions. Such a kingdom 
was the empire of the Caesars, a kingdom where peaceful 
men could work, think, and speak as they pleased, and 
travel freely among provinces ruled for the most part by 
Gallios * who protected life and property, and forbade fanat- 
ics to tear each other to pieces for their religious opinions. 

" It is not lawful for us to put any man to death," was 
the complaint of the Jewish priests to the Roman governor. 
Had Europe and Asia been covered with independent na- 
tions, each with a local religion represented in its ruling 
powers, Christianity must have been stifled in its cradle. 
If St. Paul had escaped the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, he 
would have been torn to death by the silversmiths at Ephe- 
sus. The appeal to Caesar's judgment-seat was the shield 
of his mission, and alone made possible his success. 

And this spirit which confined government to its simple 
duties, while . it left opinion unfettered, was specially pres- 
ent in Julius Caesar himself. From cant of all kinds he 
was totally free. He was a friend of the people, but in- 
dulged in no enthusiasm for liberty. He never dilated on 
the beauties of virtue, or complimented, as Cicero did, a 
Providence in which he did not believe. He was too sin- 
cere to stoop to unreality. He held to the facts of this life 
and to his own convictions ; and as he found no reason for 
supposing that there was a life beyond the grave, he did not 

* Gallic was the proconsul of Achaia, and the elder brother of the 
philosopher Seneca. The Apostle Paul was brought before his judg- 
ment-seat by the Jews, and he thus answered : " If it were a matter of 
wrong or wicked lewdness, ye Jews, reason would that I should bear 
with you. But if it be a question of words and names, and of your 
law, look ye to it ; for I will be no judge of such matters." Acts 18 : 
14, 15. The name has become a synonym for the attitude of philo- 
sophical indifference. (G. F. F.) 



TRAJAN, 53 

pretend to expect it. He respected the religion of the 
Roman state as an institution established by the laws. 

He encouraged or left unmolested the creeds and prac- 
tices of the uncounted sects and tribes who were gathered 
under the eagles. But his own writings contain nothing to 
indicate that he himself had any religious belief at all. He 
saw no evidence that the gods practically interfered in 
human affairs. He never pretended that Jupiter was on 
his side. He thanked his soldiers after a victory, but he 
did not order Te Deiims to be sung for it ; and in the ab- 
sence of these conventionalisms he perhaps showed more 
real reverence than he could have displayed by the freest 
use of the formulas of piety. He fought his battles to estab- 
lish some tolerable degree of justice in the government of 
this world ; and he succeeded though he was murdered for 
doing it. 



TRAJAN. 

By CHAELES MERIVALE. 

[M. (Jlpius Trajaniis, successor as Roman emperor to Nerva, bom 
A. D. 53, ascended the throne 99 ; died 118. One of the most illus- 
trious among those who wore the Roman purple, his reign was dis- 
tinguished as much by happiness and prosperity as by lofty virtues. 
As a soldier, Trajan subdued the Dacians, completed the conquest of 
Germany and Sarmatia, annexed Armenia to the empire, and subdued 
the Parthians to the Roman yoke. His civic administration was no 
less notable than his military conquests and organization.] 

The princely prodigality of Trajan's taste was defrayed 
by the plunder or the tribute of conquered enemies, and 
seems to have laid at least no extraordinary burden on his 
subjects. His rage for building had the further merit of 
being directed for the most part to works of public utility 
and interest. He built for the gods, the senate, and the 
people, and not for himself ; he restored the palaces, en- 



54 GREAT LEADERS. 

larged the halls and places of public resort ; but he was 
content himself with the palaces of his predecessors. A 
writer three centuries later declares of Trajan that he built 
the world over ; and the wide diffusion and long continu- 
ance of his fame beyond that of so many others of the im- 
perial series may be partly attributed to the constant recur- 
rence of his name conspicuously inscribed on the most solid 
and best known monuments of the empire. 

The care of this wise and liberal ruler extended from the 
harbors, aqueducts, and bridges to the general repair of the 
highways of the empire. He was the great improver, though 
not the inventor of the system of posts on the chief roads, 
which formed a striking feature of Eoman civilization as 
an instrument for combining the remotest provinces under 
a central organization. 

The legislation of this popular emperor is marked gen- 
erally by a special consideration for Italian interests. The 
measures by which he secured a constant supply of grain 
from the provinces, exempting its exportation from all du- 
ties, and stimulating the growers at one extremity of the 
empire to relieve the deficiencies of another, were directed to 
the maintenance of abundance in Eome and Italy. Thus, 
on the casual failure of the harvest in Egypt, her empty 
granaries were at once replenished from the superfluous 
stores of Gaul, Spain, or Africa. 

Though Trajan's mind did not rise to wide and liberal 
views for the advantages of the provinces, he neglected no 
favorable opportunity for the benefit of particular localities. 
His hand was open to bestow endowments and largesses, to 
relieve public calamities, to increase public enjoyments, to 
repair the ravages of earthquakes and tempests, to construct 
roads and canals, theatres and aqueducts. The activity dis- 
played through the empire in works of this unproductive 
nature shows a great command of money, an abundant cur- 
rency, easy means of transacting business, ample resources 
of labor, and well devised schemes of combining and unfold- 



TRAJAN, 55 

ing t]iem. Judicious economy went ever hand in hand with 
genuine magnificence. 

The monuments of Roman jurisprudence contain many- 
examples of Trajan's legislation. Like the great statesmen 
of the republic, he returned from the camp to the city to 
take his seat daily on the tribunals with the ablest judges 
for his assessors. He heard appeals from the highest courts 
throughout his dominion, and the final sentence he pro- 
nounced assumed the validity of a legal enactment. The 
clemency of Trajan was as conspicuous as his love of justice, 
and to him is ascribed the noble sentiment, that it is better 
that the guilty should escape than the innocent suffer. 

The justice, the modesty, the unwearied application of 
Trajan were deservedly celebrated, no less than his valor in 
war and his conduct in political affairs. But a great part 
of his amazing popularity was owing, no doubt, to his gen- 
ial demeanor and to the affection inspired by his qualities as 
a friend and associate. The remains still existing of his 
correspondence in the letters of Pliny bring out not only 
the manners of the time, but in some degree the character 
of the prince also ; and bear ample testimony to his minute 
vigilance and unwearied application, his anxiety for his 
subjects' well-being, the ease with which he conducted his 
intercourse with his friends, and the ease with which he in- 
spired them in return. 

Trajan's letters bespeak the polished gentleman no less 
than the statesman. He was fond of society, and of edu- 
cated and literary society. He was proud of being known 
to associate with the learned, and felt himself complimented 
when he bestowed on the rhetorician Dion the compliment 
of carrying him in his own chariot. That such refinement 
of taste was not incompatible with excess in the indulgences 
of the table was the fault of the times, and more particularly 
of the habits of camp life to which he had been accustomed. 
Intemperance was always a Roman vice. 

The affability of the prince, and the freedom with which 



56 GREAT LEADERS: 

he exchanged with his nobles all the offices of ordinary- 
courtesy and hospitality, bathing, supping, or hunting as 
an equal in their company, constituted one of his greatest 
charms in the eyes of a jealous patriciate which had seen 
its masters too often engrossed by the flatteries of freedmen 
and still viler associates. 

But Trajan enjoyed also the distinction dear in Roman 
eyes of a fine figure and a noble countenance. In stature 
he exceeded the common height, and on public occasions, 
when he loved to walk bareheaded in the midst of the sen- 
ators, his gray hairs gleamed conspicuously above the crowd. 
His features, as we may trace them unmistakably on his 
innumerable busts and medals, were regular ; and his face 
was the last of the imperial series that retained the true 
Roman type — ^not in the aquiline nose only, but in the broad 
and low forehead, the angular chin, the firm, compressed 
lips, and generally in the stern compactness of its structure. 

The thick and straight-cut hair, smoothed over the brow 
without a curl or parting, marks the simplicity of the man's 
character in a voluptuous age which delighted in the cult- 
ure of flowing or frizzed locks. But the most interesting 
characteristic of the figure I have so vividly before me is the 
look of painful thought, which seems to indicate a constant 
sense of overwhelming responsibilities, honorably and bravely- 
borne, yet, notwithstanding much assumed cheerfulness and 
self-abandonment, ever irritating the nerves and weighing 
upon the conscience. 



THE ANTONINES. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Titus Antoninus Pius, born 86 a. d., mounted the throne 138, 
died 161 ; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, adopted son and successor of 
the preceding, born 121 a. d., mounted the throne 161, died 180. The 
first of the Antonines was born of a respectable family, settled in 
Gaul, became pro-consul of Asia under Hadrian, afterward of a division 



THE ANTONINES. 57 

of Italy, and was selected by Hadrian as his successor on account of 
his ability and virtues. Marcus Aurelius was distinguished not only as 
general and administrator, as a ruler of the most exemplary and noble 
character, but his name has descended to modern ages as that of the 
royal philosopher. His " Meditations " constitute one of the Roman 
classics. 

UiS'DER Hadrian's reign the empire flourished in peace 
and prosperity. He encouraged the arts, reformed the laws, 
assisted military discipline, and visited all his provinces in 
person. His vast and active genius was equally suited to 
the most enlarged views and the minute details of civil 
policy. But the ruling passions of his soul were curiosity 
and vanity. As they prevailed and as they were attracted 
by different objects, Hadrian was by turns an excellent 
prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant. The gen- 
eral tenor of his conduct deserved praise for its equity and 
moderation. Yet in the first days of his reign he put to 
death four consular senators, his personal enemies, and men 
who*had been deemed worthy of empire ; and the tedious- 
ness of a painful illness at last made him peevish and cruel. 

The senate doubted whether they should pronounce him 
a god or a tyrant, and the honors decreed to his memory were 
granted to the prayers of the pious Antonines. The ca- 
price of Hadrian influenced his choice of a successor. After 
revolving in his mind several men of distinguished merit 
whom he esteemed and hated, he adopted -^lius Verus, a 
gay and voluptuous nobleman, recommended by uncommon 
beauty. But while Hadrian was delighting himself with 
his own applause and the acclamations of the soldiers, 
whose consent had been secured by an immense donative, 
the new Caesar was reft from imperial friendship by an un- 
timely death. 

He left only one son. Hadrian recommended the boy 
to the gratitude of the Antonines. He was adopted by 
Pius, and on the accession of Marcus was invested with an 
equal share of sovereign power. Among the many vices of 



58 GREAT LEADERS. 

this younger Verus, lie possessed one virtue — a dutiful rev- 
erence for his wiser colleague, to whom he willingly aban- 
doned the ruder cares of empire. The philosophic em- 
peror dissembled his follies, lamented his early death, and 
cast a decent veil over his memory. 

As soon as Hadrian's caprice in friendship had been 
gratified or disappointed, he resolved to deserve the thanks 
of posterity by placing the most exalted merit on the Eoman 
throne. His discerning eye easily discovered a senator 
about fifty years of age, blameless in all the offices of life, 
and a youth about seventeen, whose riper years opened the 
fair prospect of every virtue. The elder of these was de- 
clared the son and successor of Hadrian, on condition, how- 
ever, that he himself should immediately adopt the younger. 
The two Antonines (for it is of them we are now speaking) 
governed the Roman world forty-two years with the same 
invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue. 

Although Pius had two sons, he preferred the welfare of 
Rome to the interests of his family; gave his daughter 
Faustina in marriage to young Marcus, obtained from the 
senate the tribunitial and consular powers and pro-consular 
powers, and with a noble disdain, or rather ignorance of 
jealousy, associated him to all the labors of government. 

Marcus, on the other hand, revered the character of his 
benefactor, loved him as a parent, obeyed him as his sover- 
eign, and, after he was no more, regulated his own adminis- 
tration by the example and maxims of his predecessor. 
Their united reigns are possibly the only period in history 
in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object 
of government. 

Titus Antoninus Pius has been justly denominated a 
second Numa. The same love of religion, justice, and peace 
was the distinguishing characteristic of both princes. But 
the situation of the latter opened a much larger field for the 
exercise of these virtues. Numa could only prevent a few 
neighboring villages from plundering each other's harvests. 



THE ANTONINES. 59 

Antoninus diffused order and tranquillity over the greater 
part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advan- 
tage of furnishing very few materials for history; which 
is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, 
and misfortunes of mankind. 

In private life he was an amiable as well as a good man. 
The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity 
or affectation. He enjoyed with moderation the conven- 
iences of his fortune and the innocent pleasures of society ; 
and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheer- 
ful serenity of temper. 

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer 
and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest 
of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, 
and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve 
years he embraced the rigid doctrines of the Stoics, which 
taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his 
reason ; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only 
evil, all things external as things indifferent. His " Medita- 
tions," composed in the tumult of a camp, are still extant ; 
and he even condescended to give lessons on philosophy in 
a more public manner than was perhaps consistent with 
the modesty of a sage or the dignity of an emperor. But 
his life was the noblest commentary on the philosophy of 
Zeno. 

He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections 
of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted 
that the death of Ovidius Cassius, who excited a rebellion 
in Syria, had disappointed him, by a voluntary death, of the 
pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend; and he 
justified the sincerity of that statement by moderating the 
zeal of the senate against the adherents of the traitor. 

War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human 
nature ; but when the necessity of a just defense called on 
him to t^ke up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight 
winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the 



60 GREAT LEADERS. 

severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his 
constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful pos- 
terity, and above a century after his death, many persons 
preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among those of 
their household gods. 

If a man were called on to fix the period in the history 
of the world during which the condition of the human race 
was most happy and prosperous he would, without hesita- 
tion, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian 
to the accession of Oommodus. The vast extent of the 
Eoman Empire was governed by absolute power under 
the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were re- 
strained by the firm but gentle hand of five successive 
emperors, whose characters and authority commanded uni- 
versal respect. 

The forms of the civil administration were carefully 
preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, 
who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased 
with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of 
the laws. Such princes deserved the honor of restoring the 
republic had the Romans of their days been capable of 
enjoying a rational freedom. The labors of these monarchs 
were overpaid by the immense reward that inseparably 
waited on their success, by the honest pride of virtue, and 
by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness 
of which they were the authors. 



ZENOBIA, QUEEN OF PALMYEA. 

By ED WAED gibbon. 

[Septimia Zenobia, of mixed Greek and Arab descent, dates of birth 
and death doubtful. Twice married, she reached through her second 
husband, Odenathus, Prince of Palmyra, a field for the exercise of her 
great talents. She aspired to be Empress of Western Asia after her 
husband's death, and only succumbed to the superior genius or for- 



ZENOBIA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. 61 

tune of Aiirelian, the Roman Emperor. The unsuccessful issue of two 
pitched battles and two sieges placed her in the power of Rome (273 
A. D.). The clemency of the victor, though it made the captive an 
ornament of his triumph, loaded her with wealth and kindness, while 
it relegated her to a private station.] 

MoDERK Europe has produced several illustrious women 
who have sustained with glory the weight of empire ; nor is 
our own age destitute of such distinguished characters. But 
if we except the doubtful achievements of Semiramis, Zeno- 
bia is perhaps the only female whose superior genius broke 
through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the 
habits and climate of Asia. She claimed her descent from 
the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equaled in beauty her an- 
cestor Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in chastity 
and valor. 

Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most 
heroic of her sex. She was of a dark complexion (for in 
speaking of a lady these trifles become important) ; her 
teeth were of a pearly whiteness ; and her large black eyes 
sparkled with uncommon fire tempered by the most attract- 
ive sweetness. Her voice was strong and harmonious. Her 
manly understanding was strengthened and adorned by 
study. She was not ignorant of the Latin tongue, but pos- 
sessed in equal perfection the Greek, the Syriac, and the 
Egyptian languages. She had drawn up for her own use an 
epitome of Oriental history, and familiarly compared the 
beauties of Homer and Plato under the tuition of the sub- 
lime Longinus. This accomplished woman gave her hand 
to Odenathus, who from a private station raised himself to 
the dominion of the East. She soon became the friend and 
companion of a hero. In the intervals of war Odenathus 
passionately delighted in the exercise of hunting. He pur- 
sued with ardor the wild beasts of the desert — lions, pan- 
thers, and bears — and the ardor of Zenobia in that danger- 
ous amusement was not inferior to his own. She had inured 
her constitution to fatigue, disdained the use of a covered 



62 GREAT LEADERS. 

carriage, generally appeared on horseback in a military 
habit, and sometimes marched several miles on foot at the 
head of the troops. 

The success of Odenathus was in great measure ascribed 
to her incomparable prudence and fortitude. Their splen- 
did victories over the Great King, whom they twice pursued 
as far as the gates of Ctesiphon, laid the foundation of their 
united fame and power. The armies which they commanded 
and the provinces which they had saved acknowledged not 
any other sovereigns than their invincible chiefs. The sen- 
ate and people of Eome revered a stranger who had avenged 
their captive emj^eror, and even the insensible son of Vale- 
rian accepted Odenathus for his legitimate colleague. 

After a successful expedition against the Gothic plunder- 
ers of Asia the Palmyrenian prince returned to the city of 
Emesa in Syria. Invincible in war, he was there cut oif by 
domestic treason, and his favorite amusement of hunting 
was the cause, or at least the occasion, of his death. His 
nephew M^eonius presumed to dart his javelin before that of 
his uncle ; and, though admonished of his error, repeated his 
insolence. As a monarch and as a sportsman Odenathus 
was provoked, took away his horse — a mark of ignominy 
among barbarians — and chastised his rash youth by a short 
confinement. The offense was soon forgot, but the punish- 
ment was remembered; and Maeonius, with a few daring 
associates, assassinated his uncle in the midst of a great 
entertainment. Herod, the son of Odenathus, though not 
of Zenobia, a young man of soft and effeminate temper, was 
killed with his father. But Maeonius obtained only the 
pleasures of revenge by this bloody deed. He had scarcely 
time to assume the title of Augustus before he was sacrificed 
by Zenobia to the memory of her husband. With the assist- 
ance of his most faithful friends she immediately filled the 
vacant throne and governed with manly counsels Palmyra, 
Syria, and the East above five years. By the death of Ode- 
nathus, that authority was at an end which the senate had 



ZEJSrOBIA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. 63 

granted him only as a personal distinction ; but his widow, 
disdaining both the senate and Gallienus, obliged one of 
the Roman generals who was sent against her to retreat into 
Europe with the loss of his army and his reputation. 

Instead of the little passions which so frequently perj^lex 
a female reign, the administration of Zenobia was guided by 
the most judicious maxims of policy. If it was expedient to 
pardon, she could calm her resentment ; if it were necessary 
to punish, she could impose silence on the voice of pity. 
Her strict economy was accused of avarice ; yet on every 
proper occasion she appeared magnificent and liberal. The 
neighboring states of Arabia, Armenia, and Persia dreaded 
her enmity and solicited her alliance. To the dominions of 
Odenathus, which extended from the Euphrates to the 
frontiers of Bithynia, his widow added the inheritance of 
her ancestors, the populous and fertile kingdom of Egypt. 
The Emperor Claudius acknowledged her merit, and was 
content that while he pursued the Gothic war, she should 
pursue the dignity of the empire in the East. The con- 
duct, however, of Zenobia was attended with some am- 
biguity ; nor is it unlikely that she had conceived the design 
of erecting an independent and hostile monarchy. She 
blended with the popular manners of Roman princes the 
stately pomp of the courts of Asia, and exacted from her 
subjects the same adoration that was paid to the successors 
of Cyrus. She bestowed on her three sons a Latin educa- 
tion, and often showed them to the troops adorned with the 
imperial purple. For herself she reserved the diadem with 
the splendid but doubtful title of Queen of the East. 

When Aurelian passed over into Asia, against an adver- 
sary whose sex alone could render her an object of contempt, 
his presence restored obedience to the province of Bithynia, 
already shaken by the arts and the arms of Zenobia. Ad- 
vancing at the head of his legions, he accepted the sub- 
mission of Ancyra, and was admitted into Tyana after an 
obstinate siege, by the help of a perfidious citizen. Zenobia 



64: GREAT LEADERS. 

would have ill deserved her reputation had she indolently 
permitted the Emperor of the West to approach within a 
hundred miles of her capital. The fate of the East was 
decided in two great battles, so similar in almost every cir- 
cumstance that we can scarcely distinguish them from each 
other, except by observing that the first was fought near 
Antioch and the second near Emesa. -After the defeat of 
Emesa Zenobia found it impossible to collect a third army. 
Palmyra was the last resource of the widow of Odenathus. 
She retired within the walls of her capital, made every 
preparation for a vigorous resistance, and declared with the 
intrepidity of a heroine that the last moment of her reign 
and of her life should be the same. The siege of Palmyra 
was an object far more difl&cult and important; and the 
emperor, who with incessant vigor pressed the attacks in 
person, was himself wounded with a dart. " The Roman 
people," says Aurelian in an original letter, "speak with 
contempt of the war which I am waging against a woman. 
They are ignorant both of the character and power of Zeno- 
bia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations 
of stones, of arrows, and of every species of missile weapons. 
Every part of the walls is provided with two or three halistm, 
and artificial fires are thrown from her military engines. 
The fear of punishment has armed her with a desperate 
courage. Yet still I trust in the protecting deities of Rome, 
who have hitherto been favorable to all my undertakings." 
The firmness of Zenobia was supported by the hope that in 
a very short time famine would compel the Roman army to 
repass the desert. But from every part of Syria a regular 
succession of convoys safely arrived in the camp, which was 
increased by the return of Probus with his victorious troops 
from the conquest of Egypt. It was then that Zenobia re- 
solved to fly. She mounted the fleetest of her dromedaries, 
and had already reached the banks of the Euphrates, about 
sixty miles from Palmyra, when she was overtaken by the 
pursuit of Aurelian's light-horse, seized, and brought back 



CONSTANTINE, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR. 65 

a captive to the feet of the emperor. Her capital soon after- 
ward surrendered, and was treated with unexpected lenity. 

When the Syrian queen was brought into the presence 
of Aurelian he sternly asked her how she had presumed to 
rise in arms against the Emperor of Eome ? The answer of 
Zenobia was a prudent mixture of respect and firmness: 
"Because I disdained to consider as Eoman emperors an 
Aureolus or a Gallienus. You alone I acknowledge as my 
conqueror and sovereign." 

However, in the treatment of his unfortunate rivals, Au- 
relian might indulge his pride, he behaved toward them with 
a generous clemency which was seldom exercised by the an- 
cient conquerors. The emperor presented Zenobia with an 
elegant villa at Tibur, or Tivoli, about twenty miles from 
the capital. The Syrian queen insensibly sunk into a Eoman 
matron, her daughters married into noble families, and her 
race was not yet extinct in the fifth century. 



CONSTANTINE, THE FIEST CHRISTIAN 
EMPEROR. 

By EDWARD GIBBON. 

[Caius Flavius Valerius Aurelius Claudius, surnamed " the Great," 
born 272 a. d., died 337. He was the son of Constantine Chlorus, who 
was appointed Cmsar, or lieutenant-emperor of the western part of the 
empire which was divided between the two Aiigusti, or emperors, Dio- 
cletian and Maximian. Constantine assumed the purple of empire by 
acclamation of his legions while commanding in Britain in 306. While 
leading his army to Rome to take possession of the capital, the legend 
relates that Constantine saw a blazing cross in the sky inscribed with 
iv TovT(f viKa, " In this conquer." Thenceforward the Christian symbol 
was inscribed on the standards and shields of the army, and Chris- 
tianity became recognized as the state Church, though Constantine did 
not profess the religion till his deathbed. In the year 323 he took the 
field against his brother-in-law Licinius, Emperor of the East, and by 



QQ GREAT LEADERS. 

the defeat and execution of the latter he became sole ruler of the re- 
united empire. Among the most important events of his reign were 
the founding of the new capital of Constantinople (330) on the site of 
Byzantium, and the first great general Christian council (325), held at 
Nice, in Asia Minor. By the decision of the latter the Athanasian 
Creed, embodying the doctrine of the Trinity, was made the orthodox 
belief of the Church, and Arianism was condemned as heresy. The 
character of Constantine was stained by suspicion and cruelty, to which 
his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, his son, and his wife successively 
fell victims.] 

The character of the prince who removed the seat of 
empire and introduced such important changes into the 
civil and religious constitution of his country has fixed the 
attention and divided the opinions of mankind. By the 
grateful zeal of the Christians, the deliverer of the Church 
lias been decorated with every attribute of a hero, and even of 
a saint ; while the discontent of the vanquished party has 
compared Constantine to the most abhorred of those tp-ants 
who, by their vice and weakness, dishonored the imperial 
purple. The same passions have in some degree been per- 
petuated to succeeding generations, and the character of 
Constantine is considered, even in the present age, as an 
object either of satire or of panegyric. By the impartial 
union of those defects which are confessed by his warmest 
admirers and of those virtues which are acknowledged by 
his most implacable enemies we might hope to delineate a 
just portrait of that extraordinary man which the truth and 
candor of history should adopt without a blush. But it 
would soon appear that the vain attempt to blend such dis- 
cordant colors and to reconcile such inconsistent qualities 
must produce a figure monstrous rather than human, unless 
it is viewed in its proper and distinct lights, by a careful 
separation of the different periods of the reign of Con- 
stantine. 

The person as well as the mind of Constantine had been 
enriched by Nature with her choicest endowments. His 
stature was lofty, his countenance majestic, his deportment 



CONSTANTINE, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR. 67 

graceful ; his strength and activity were displayed in every 
manly exercise, and from his earliest youth to a very ad- 
vanced season of life he preserved the vigor of his constitu- 
tion by a strict adherence to the domestic virtues of chastity 
and temperance. He delighted in the social intercourse of 
familiar conversation ; and though he might sometimes in- 
dulge his disposition to raillery with less reserve than was 
required by the severe dignity of his station, the courtesy 
and liberality of his manners gained the hearts of all who 
approached him. The sincerity of his friendship has been 
suspected ; yet he showed on some occasions that he was not 
incapable of a warm and lasting attachment. The disad- 
vantage of an illiterate education had not prevented him 
from forming a just estimate of the value of learning, and 
the arts and sciences derived some encouragement from the 
munificent protection of Constantine. In the dispatch of 
business, his diligence was indefatigable ; and the active 
powers of his mind were almost continually exercised in 
reading, writing, or meditating, in giving audience to am- 
bassadors, and in examining the complaints of his subjects. 
Even those who censured the propriety of his measures were 
compelled to acknowledge that he possessed magnanimity to 
conceive and patience to execute the most arduous designs 
without being checked either by the prejudices of education 
or by the clamors of the multitude. In the field he infused 
his own intrepid spirit into the troops, whom he conducted 
with the talents of a consummate general ; and to his abili- 
ties, rather than to his fortune, we may ascribe the signal 
victories which he obtained over the foreign and domestic 
foes of the republic. He loved glory as the reward, perhaps 
as the motive of his labors. 

The boundless ambition which, from the moment of his 
accepting the purple at York, appears as the ruling passion 
of his soul, may be justified by the dangers of his own situ- 
ation, by the character of his rivals, by the consciousness of 
superior merit, and by the prospect that his success would 



68 GREAT LEADERS. 

enable him to restore peace and order to the distracted em- 
pire. In his civil wars against Maxentius and Licinius, he 
had engaged on his side the inclinations of the people, who 
compared the undissembled vices of those tyrants with the 
spirit of wisdom and justice which seemed to direct the 
general tenor of the administration of Constantine. 

Had Constantine fallen on the banks of the Tiber, or 
even in the plains of Adrianople, such is the character 
which, with a few exceptions, he might have transmitted to 
posterity. But the conclusion of his reign (according to 
the moderate and indeed tender sentence of a writer of the 
same age) degraded him from the rank which he had ac- 
quired among the most deserving of the Roman princes. In 
the life of Augustus, we behold the tyrant of the republic 
converted almost by imperceptible degrees into the father 
of his country and of human kind. In that of Constantine, 
we may contemplate a hero who had so long inspired his 
subjects with love and his enemies with terror degenerating 
into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune 
or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation. 
The general peace which he maintained during the last 
fourteen years (a. d. 323-337) of his reign was a period of 
apparent splendor rather than of real prosperity ; and the 
old age of Constantine was disgraced by the opposite yet 
reconcilable vices of rapaciousness and prodigality. The 
accumulated treasures found in the palaces of Maxentius 
and Licinius were lavishly consumed ; the various innova- 
tions introduced by the conqueror were attended with an 
increasing expense ; the cost of his buildings, his court, and 
his festivals, required an immediate and plentiful supply ; 
and the oppression of the people was the only fund which 
could support the magnificence of the sovereign. 

His unworthy favorites, enriched by the boundless lib- 
erality of their master, usurped with impunity the privilege 
of rapine and corruption. A secret but universal decay was 
felt in every part of the public administration, and the em- 



CONSTANTINE, TEE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR. gQ 

peror himself, though he still retained the obedience, grad- 
ually lost the esteem of his subjects. The dress and man- 
ners which, toward the decline of life, he chose to affect, 
served only to degrade him in the eyes of mankind. The 
Asiatic pomp, which had been adopted by the pride of Dio- 
cletian, assumed an air of softness and effeminacy in the 
person of Constantine. He is represented with false hair of 
various colors laboriously arranged by the skillful artists of 
the times, a diadem of a new and more expensive fashion, 
a profusion of gems and pearls, of collars and bracelets, and 
a variegated flowing robe of silk, most curiously embroidered 
with flowers of gold. In such apparel, scarcely to be excused 
by the youth and folly of Elagabalus, we are at a loss to dis- 
cover the wisdom of an aged monarch and the simplicity of 
a Roman veteran. A mind thus relaxed by prosperity and 
indulgence was incapable of rising to that magnanimity 
which disdains suspicion and dares to forgive. The deaths 
of Maximian and Licinius may, perhaps, be justified by the 
maxims of policy, as they are taught in the schools of ty- 
rants ; but an impartial narrative of the executions, or rather 
murders, which sullied the declining age of Constantine 
will suggest to our most candid thoughts the idea of a prince 
who could sacrifice without reluctance the laws of justice 
and the feelings of nature to the dictates either of his pas- 
sions or of his interest. 

The same fortune which so invariably followed the stand- 
ard of Constantine seemed to secure the hopes and comforts 
of his domestic life. Those among his predecessors who 
had enjoyed the longest and most prosperous reigns — Au- 
gustus, Trajan, and Diocletian — had been disappointed of 
posterity ; and the frequent revolutions had never allowed 
sufficient time for any imperial family to grow up and mul- 
tiply under the shade of the purple. But the royalty of the 
Flavian line, which had been first ennobled by the Gothic 
Claudius, descended through several generations ; and Con- 
stantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary 



^0 GEE AT LEADERS. 

honors which he transmitted to his children. Besides the 
females and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve 
males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply 
the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the 
order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to 
support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty 
years this numerous and increasing family was reduced to 
the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had sur- 
vived a series of crimes and calamities such as the tragic 
poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and 
of Cadmus. 



JULIAN THE APOSTATE. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Flavius Claudius Julianus, born 331 a. d., died 363. He was 
the nephew of Constantine, and was made CcBsar by his cousin the 
Emperor Constantius in 355. On the death of the latter, Julian be- 
came sole emperor in 361. Though bred in the Christian faith, his 
deep sympathy with the philosophy and letters of Greece, and his aver- 
sion to the factional bigotry of the Christian sects, caused him, on 
assuming the purple, to discard the doctrines of Christ, and attempt 
the restitution of paganism.l 

The retired scholastic education of Julian, in which he 
had been more conversant with books than with arms, with 
the dead than with the living, left him in profound igno- 
rance of the practical arts of war and government ; and 
when he awkwardly repeated some military exercise which 
it was necessary for him to learn, he exclaimed, with a sigh, 
" Oh Plato, Plato, what a task for a philosopher ! " Yet 
even this speculative philosophy, which men of business are 
too apt to despise, had filled the mind of Julian with the 
noblest precepts and the most shining examples ; had ani- 
mated him with the love of virtue, the desire of fame, and 
the contempt of death. The habits of temperance recom- 



JULIAN THE APOSTATE. 71 

mended in the scliools are still more essential in the severe 
discipline of a camp. The simple wants of nature regulated 
the measure of his food and sleep. Rejecting with disdain 
the delicacies provided for his table, he satisfied his appetite 
with the coarse and common fare which was allotted to the 
meanest soldiers. During the rigor of a Galhc winter he 
never suffered a fire in his bed-chamber ; and after a short 
and interrupted slumber, he frequently rose in the middle 
of the night from a carpet spread on the floor, to dispatch 
any urgent business, to visit his rounds, or to steal a few 
moments for the prosecution of his favorite studies. 

The precepts of eloquence, which he had hitherto prac- 
ticed on fancied topics of declamation, were more usefully 
applied to excite or assuage the passions of an armed multi- 
tude ; and though Julian, from his early habits of conversa- 
tion and literature, was more familiarly acquainted with the 
beauties of the Greek language, he had attained a compe- 
tent knowledge of the Latin tongue. Since Julian was not 
originally designed for the character of a legislator or a 
judge, it is probable that the civil jurisprudence of the 
Eomans had not engaged any considerable share of his at- 
tention ; but he derived from his philosophic studies an 
inflexible regard for justice, tempered by a disposition to 
clemency ; the knowledge of the general principles of equity 
and evidence ; and the faculty of patiently investigating the 
most intricate and tedious questions which could be pro- 
posed for his discussion. The measures of policy and the 
operations of war must submit to the various accidents of 
circumstance and character, and the unpracticed student 
will often be perplexed in the application of the most perfect 
theory. But, in the acquisition of this important science, 
Julian was assisted by the active vigor of his own genius, as 
well as by the wisdom and experience of Sallust, an officer 
of rank, who soon conceived a sincere attachment for a 
prince so worthy of his friendship ; and whose incorrupti- 
ble integrity was adorned by the talent of insinuating 



Y2 GREAT LEADERS. 

the harshest truths, without wounding the delicacy of a 
royal ear. 

Julian was not insensible of the advantages of freedom. 
From his studies he had imbibed the spirit of ancient sages 
and heroes ; his life and fortunes had depended on the 
caprice of a tyrant, and when he ascended the throne his 
pride was sometimes mortified by the reflection that the 
slaves who would not dare to censure his defects were not 
worthy to applaud his virtues. He sincerely abhorred the 
system of Oriental despotism which Diocletian, Constan- 
tine, and the patient habits of fourscore years had estab- 
lished in the empire. A motive of superstition prevented 
the execution of the design which Julian had frequently 
meditated, of relieving his head from the weight of a costly 
diadem ; but he absolutely refused the title of Dominus, or 
Lord — a word which was grown so familiar to the ears of 
the Eomans that they no longer remembered its servile and 
humiliating origin. The office, or rather the name, of con- 
sul was cherished by a prince who contemplated with rever- 
ence the ruins of the republic ; and the same behavior which 
had been assumed by the prudence of Augustus was adopted 
by Julian from choice and inclination. On the calends of 
January (A. D. 363, January 1st), at break of day, the new 
consuls, Mamertinus and Nevitta, hastened to the palace to 
salute the emperor. As soon as he was informed of their 
approach he leaped from his throne, eagerly advanced to 
meet them, and compelled the blushing magistrates to re- 
ceive the demonstrations of his affected humility. From 
the palace they proceeded to the senate. The emperor, on 
foot, marched before their litters ; and the gazing multitude 
admired the image of ancient times, or secretly blamed a 
conduct which, in their eyes, degraded the majesty of the 
purple. But the behavior of Julian was uniformly sup- 
ported. During the games of the Circus he had, impru- 
dently or designedly, performed the manumission of a slave 
in the presence of the consul. The moment he was re- 



JULIAN THE APOSTATE. ^3 

minded that lie had trespassed on the jurisdiction of another 
magistrate, he condemned himself to pay a fine of ten 
pounds of gold, and embraced this public occasion of de- 
claring to the world that he was subject, like the rest of his 
fellow-citizens, to the laws, and even to the forms of the 
republic. The spirit of his administration and his regard 
for the place of his nativity induced Julian to confer on the 
senate of Constantinople the same honors, priWleges, and 
authority which were still enjoyed by the senate of ancient 
Rome.* A legal fiction was introduced, and gradually es- 
tablished, that one half of the national council had migrated 
into the East ; and the despotic successors of Julian, accept- 
ing the title of senators, acknowledged themselves the mem- 
bers of a respectable body which was permitted to represent 
the majesty of the Roman name. From Constantinople, 
the attention of the monarch was extended to the municipal 
senates of the provinces. He abolished, by repeated edicts, 
the unjust and pernicious exemptions which had withdrawn 
so many idle citizens from the service of their country ; and, 
by imposing an equal distribution of public duties, he re- 
stored the strength, the splendor, or, according to the glow- 
ing expression of Libanius, the soul of the expiring cities of 
his empire. The venerable age of Greece excited the most 
tender compassion in the mind of Julian, which kindled 
into rapture when he recollected the gods, the heroes, and 
the men superior to heroes and to gods, who had bequeathed 
to the latest posterity the monuments of their genius or the 
example of their virtues. He relieved the distress, and re- 
stored the beauty of the cities of Epirus and Peloponnesus. 
Athens acknowledged him for her benefactor; Argos, for 
her deliverer. The pride of Corinth, again rising from her 

* The legal fiction of the republic and of its governmental machin- 
ery was carefully perpetuated by Augustus and his successors in the em- 
pire until the destruction of the Western Empire. Public acts were in 
the name of the " senate and people of Rome." The same pious fraud 
continued in the Empire of the East till the reign of Justinian. — G. T. F* 
4- 



74: GREAT LEADERS. 

ruins with the honors of a Eoman colony, exacted a tribute 
from the adjacent republics for the purpose of defraying the 
games of the Isthmus, which were celebrated in the amphi- 
theatre with the hunting of bears and panthers. From this 
tribute the cities of Elis, of Delphi, and of Argos, which 
had inherited from their remote ancestors the sacred office 
of perpetuating the Olympic, the Pythian, and the Nemean 
games, claimed a just exemption. The immunity of Elis 
and Delphi was respected by the Corinthians, but the pov- 
erty of Argos tempted the insolence of oppression, and the 
feeble complaints of its deputies were silenced by the decree 
of a provincial magistrate, who seems to have consulted only 
the interest of the capital in which he resided. Seven years 
after this sentence Julian allowed the cause to be referred 
to a superior tribunal, and his eloquence was interposed — 
most probably with success — in the defense of a city which 
had been the royal seat of Agamemnon and had given to 
Macedonia a race of kings and conquerors. 

The laborious administration of military and civil affairs, 
which were multiplied in proportion to the extent of the 
empire, exercised the abilities of Julian ; but he frequently 
assumed the two characters of orator and of judge, which 
are almost unknown to the modern sovereigns of Europe. 
The arts of persuasion, so diligently cultivated by the first 
Caesars, were neglected by the military ignorance and Asiatic 
pride of their successors ; and if they condescended to ha- 
rangue the soldiers, whom they feared, they treated with 
silent disdain the senators, whom they despised. The as- 
semblies of the senate, which Constantius had avoided, were 
considered by Julian as the place where he could exhibit, 
with the most propriety, the maxims of a republican and 
the talents of a rhetorician. He alternately practiced, as in 
a school of declamation, the several modes of praise, of cen- 
sure, of exhortation ; and his friend Libanius has remarked 
that the study of Homer taught him to imitate the simple, 
concise style of Menelaus, the copiousness of Nestor, whose 



JULIAN THE APOSTATE. Y5 

words descended like the flakes of a winter's snow, or the 
pathetic and forcible eloquence of Ulysses. 

The functions of a judge, which are sometimes incom- 
patible with those of a prince, were exercised by Julian, not 
only as a duty, but as an amusement; and, although he 
might have trusted the integrity and discernment of his 
praBtorian prefects, he often placed himself by their side on 
the seat of judgment. The acute penetration of his mind 
was agreeably occupied in detecting and defeating the chi- 
canery of the advocates, who labored to disguise the truth 
of facts and to pervert the sense of the laws. He some- 
times forgot the gravity of his station, asked indiscreet or 
unseasonable questions, and betrayed, by the loudness of his 
voice and the agitation of his body, the earnest vehemence 
with which he maintained his opinion against the judges, 
the advocates, and their clients. But his knowledge of his 
own temper prompted him to encourage, and even to solicit, 
the reproof of his friends and ministers ; and whenever they 
ventured to oppose the irregular sallies of his passions, the 
spectators could observe the shame, as well as the gratitude, 
of their monarch. The decrees of Julian were almost al- 
ways founded on the principles of justice ; and he had the 
firmness to resist the two most dangerous temptations which 
assault the tribunal of a sovereign, under the specious forms 
of compassion and equity. He decided the merits of the 
cause without weighing the circumstances of the parties; 
and the poor, whom he wished to relieve, were condemned 
to satisfy the just demands of a noble and wealthy adver- 
sary. He carefully distinguished the judge from the legis- 
lator ; and, though he meditated a necessary reformation of 
the Koman jurisprudence, he pronounced sentence accord- 
ing to the strict and literal interpretation of those laws 
which the magistrates were bound to execute and the sub- 
jects to obey. 

The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their 
purple and cast naked into the world, would immediately 



76 GREAT LEADERS. 

sink fo tlie lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerg- 
ing from their obscurity. But the personal merit of Julian 
was, in some measure, independent of his fortune. AVhat- 
ever had been his choice of life, by the force of intrepid 
courage, lively wit, and intense application, he would have 
obtained, or at least he would have deserved, the highest 
honors of his profession ; and Julian might have raised 
himself to the rank of minister, or general, of the state in 
which he was born a private citizen. If the jealous caprice 
of power had disappointed his expectations, if he had pru- 
dently declined the paths of greatness, the employment of 
the same talents in studious solitude would have placed 
beyond the reach of kings his present happiness and his 
immortal fame. When we inspect with minute, or perhaps 
malevolent attention the portrait of Julian, something seems 
wanting to the grace and perfection of the whole figure. 
His genius was less powerful and sublime than that of 
Caesar ; nor did he possess the consummate prudence of 
Augustus. The virtues of Trajan appear more steady and 
natural, and the philosophy of Marcus is more simple and 
consistent. Yet Julian sustained adversity with firmness, 
and prosperity with moderation. After an interval of one 
hundred and twenty years from the death of Alexander 
Severus, the Eomans beheld an emperor who made no dis- 
tinction between his duties and his pleasures ; who labored 
to relieve the distress and to revive the spirit of his subjects ; 
and who endeavored always to connect authority with merit, 
and happiness with virtue. Even faction, and religious fac- 
tion, was constrained to acknowledge the superiority of his 
genius, in peace as well as in war ; and to confess, with a 
sigh, that the apostate Julian was a lover of his country, and 
that he deserved the empire of the world. 

The character of apostate has injured the reputation of 
Julian, and the enthusiasm which clouded his virtues has 
exaggerated the real and ajjparent magnitude of his faults. 
The vehement zeal of the Christians, who despised the wor- 



THEODOSIUS THE GREAT. 77 

ship, and overturned the altars of those fabulous deities, 
engaged their votary in a state of irreconcilable hostility 
with a very numerous party of his subjects; and he was 
sometimes tempted, by the desire of victory or the shame 
of a repulse, to violate the laws of prudence, and even of 
justice. The triumph of the party which he deserted and 
opposed, has fixed a stain of infamy on the name of Julian ; 
and the unsuccessful apostate has been overwhelmed with a 
torrent of pious invectives, of which the signal was given by 
the sonorous trumpet of Gregory Nazianzen.* 



THEODOSIUS THE GEEAT. 

By EDWARD GIBBON. 

[Born in Spain, about 346 a. d., of a Visigothic family, and died 
895. He was made Augustus, or co-Emperor of the West, by Gratian, 
in 379, but became by his great abilities the practical ruler of the two 
empires, with his imperial seat at Constantinople. Theodosius twice 
reconquered the West, where usurpers had made successful revolt, and 
became the acknowledged master of the whole Roman world. He was 
the last great emperor who shone brightly by his genius for military 
affairs and his skill in civil administration. Theodosius became so 
dear to the Catholic heart by his persecution of the Arian heretics 
that he was afterward canonized. At his death the empire was again 
divided, falling to his sons, Honorius and Arcadius.] 

The same province, and, perhaps, the same city, which 
had given to the throne the virtues of Trajan and the tal- 
ents of Hadrian, was the original seat of another family of 
Spaniards, who, in a less fortunate age, possessed, near four- 
score years, the declining Empire of Eome. They emerged 
from the obscurity of municipal honors by the active spirit 

* This historian was one of the most bitter and bigoted of the writ- 
ers under the new Christian epoch ; and his partisanship was pursued 
with an acrimony unworthy of the great cause in which he was re- 
tained.— G. T. F. 



78 GREAT LEADERS. 

of the elder Theodosius — a general whose exploits in Britain 
and Africa have formed one of the most splendid parts of 
the annals of Valentinian.* The son of that general, who 
likewise bore the name of Theodosius, was educated, by- 
skillful preceptors, in the liberal studies of youth ; but he 
was instructed in the art of war by the tender care and 
severe discipline of his father. Under the standard of such 
a leader, young Theodosius sought glory and knowledge in 
the most distant scenes of military action ; inured his con- 
stitution to the difference of seasons and climates ; distin- 
guished his valor by sea and land ; and observed the various 
warfare of the Scots, the Saxons, and the Moors. His own 
merit, and the recommendation of the conqueror of Africa, 
soon raised him to a separate command ; and, in the station 
of Duke of Maesia, he vanquished an army of Sarmatians, 
saved a province, deserved the love of the soldiers, and pro- 
voked the envy of the court. His rising fortunes were soon 
blasted by the disgrace and execution of his illustrious 
father ; and Theodosius obtained, as a favor, the permission 
of retiring to a private life in his native province of Spain. 
He displayed a firm and temperate character in the ease 
with which he adapted himself to this new situation. His 
time was almost equally divided between the town and 
country ; the spirit which had animated his public conduct 
was shown in the active and affectionate performance of 
every social duty ; and the diligence of the soldier was prof- 
itably converted to the improvement of his ample patri- 
mony, which lay between Valladolid and Segovia, in the 
midst of a fruitful district, still famous for a most exquisite 
breed of sheep. From the innocent, but humble labors of 
his farm, Theodosius was transported, in less than four 

* The Emperor Julian was succeeded by Jovian, one of his gener- 
als, who was at once proclaimed by the troops. Before, however, he 
could march to Constantinople he died from a fit of indigestion, or of 
poison. Valentinian, a general of Pannonian ancestry distinguished 
for his military skill and -courage, was then proclaimed. — G. T. F. 



THEODOSIUS THE GREAT, 79 

months, to the throne of the Eastern Empire ; and the whole 
period of the history of the world will not perhaps afford a 
similar example of an elevation at the same time so pure 
and so honorable. 

The princes who peaceably inherit the scepter of their 
fathers claim and enjoy a legal right, the more secure as it 
is absolutely distinct from the merits of their personal char- 
acters. The subjects who, in a monarchy or a popular state, 
acquire the possession of supreme power may have raised 
themselves, by the superiority either of genius or virtue, 
above the heads of their equals ; but their virtue is seldom 
exempt from ambition, and the cause of the successful can- 
didate is frequently stained by the guilt of conspiracy or 
civil war. Even in those governments which allow the 
reigning monarch to declare a colleague, or a successor, his 
partial choice, which may be influenced by the blindest pas- 
sions, is often directed to an unworthy object. But the 
most suspicious malignity can not ascribe to Theodosius, in 
his obscure solitude of Caucha, the arts, the desires, or even 
the hopes, of an ambitious statesman ; and the name of the 
exile would long since have been forgotten if his genuine 
and distinguished virtues had not left a deep impression in 
the imperial court. During the season of prosperity he had 
been neglected, but in the public distress his superior merit 
was universally felt and acknowledged. "What confidence 
must have been reposed in his integrity, since Gratian could 
trust that a pious son would forgive, for the sake of the 
republic, the murder of his father ! What expectations must 
have been formed of his abilities, to encourage the hope that 
a single man could save and restore the Empire of the East ! 
Theodosius was invested with the purple in the thirty-third 
year of his age. The vulgar gazed with admiration on the 
manly beauty of his face and the graceful majesty of his 
person, which they were pleased to compare with the pict- 
ures and medals of the Emperor Trajan ; while intelligent 
observers discovered, in the qualities of his heart and under- 



80 GREAT LEADERS. 

standing, a more important resemblance to the best and 
greatest of the Roman princes. 

The orator, who may be silent without danger, may praise 
without difficulty and without reluctance ; and posterity 
will confess that the character of Theodosius might furnish 
the subject of a sincere and ample panegyric. The wisdom 
of his laws and the success of his arms rendered his admin- 
istration respectable in the eyes both of his subjects and of 
his enemies. He loved and practiced the virtues of domes- 
tic life, which seldom hold their residence in the palaces of 
kings. Theodosius was chaste and temperate ; he enjoyed 
without excess the sensual and social pleasures of the table, 
and the warmth of his amorous passions was never diverted 
from their lawful objects. The proud titles of imperial 
greatness were adorned by the tender names of a faithful 
husband, an indulgent father ; his uncle was raised, by his 
affectionate esteem, to the rank of a second parent. Theo- 
dosius embraced as his own the children of his brother and 
sister, and the expressions of his regard were extended to 
the most distant and obscure branches of his numerous 
kindred. His familiar friends were judiciously selected 
from among those persons who, in the equal intercourse of 
private life, had appeared before his eyes without a mask ; 
the consciousness of personal and superior merit enabled 
him to despise the accidental distinction of the purple ; and 
he proved by his conduct that he had forgotten all the in- 
juries while he most gratefully remembered all the favors 
and services which he had received before he ascended the 
throne of the Roman Empire. The serious or lively tone of 
his conversation was adapted to the age, the rank, or the 
character of his subjects whom he admitted into his society, 
and the affability of his manners displayed the image of his 
mind. Theodosius respected the simplicity of the good and 
virtuous ; every art, every talent of a useful, or even of an 
innocent nature, was rewarded by his judicious liberality ; 
and, except the heretics, whom he persecuted with implaca- 



TEEODOSIUS THE GREAT. 81 

ble hatred, the diffusive circle of his benevolence was circum- 
scribed only by the limits of the human race. 

The government of a mighty empire may assuredly suffice 
to occupy the time and the abilities of a mortal ; yet the 
diligent prince, without aspiring to the unsuitable reputa- 
tion of profound learning, always reserved some moments 
of his leisure for the instructive amusement of reading. 
History, which enlarged his experience, was his favorite 
study. The annals of Rome, in the long period of eleven 
hundred years, presented him with a various and splendid 
picture of human life ; and it has been particularly observed 
that whenever he perused the cruel acts of Oinna, of Marius,* 
or of Sylla, he warmly expressed his generous detestation of 
those enemies of humanity and freedom. His disinterested 
opinion of past events was usefully applied as the rule of 
his own actions ; and Theodosius has deserved the singular 
commendation that his virtues always seemed to "expand 
with his fortune — the season of his prosperity was that of 
his moderation ; and his clemency appeared the most con- 
spicuous after the danger and success of the civil war. The 
Moorish guards of the tyrant had been massacred in the first 
heat of the victory, and a small number of the most obnox- 
ious criminals suffered the punishment of the law. But the 
emperor showed himself much more attentive to relieve the 
innocent than to chastise the guilty. The oppressed subjects 
of the West, who would have deemed themselves happy in the 
restoration of their lands, were astonished to receive a sum of 
money equivalent to their losses ; and the liberality of the 
conqueror supported the aged mother and educated the or- 
phan daughters of Maximus. A character thus accomplished 
might almost excuse the extravagant supposition of the orator 
Pacatus, that, if the elder Brutus could be permitted to re- 
visit the earth, the stern republican would abjure, at the feet 
of Theodosius, his hatred of kings, and ingenuously confess 
that such a monarch was the most faithful guardian of the 
happiness and dignity of the Roman people. 



82 GREAT LEADERS. 

Yet the piercing eye of the founder of the republic must 
have discerned two essential imperfections, which might, 
perhaps, have abated his recent love of despotism. The 
virtuous mind of Theodosius was often relaxed by indolence, 
and it was sometimes inflamed by passion. In the pursuit 
of an important object, his active courage was capable of 
the most vigorous exertions ; but, as soon as the design was 
accomplished, or the danger was surmounted, the hero sunk 
into inglorious repose ; and, forgetful that the time of a 
prince is the property of his people, resigned himself to the 
enjoyment of the innocent but trifling pleasures of a luxu- 
rious court. The natural disposition of Theodosius was 
hasty and choleric ; and, in a station where none could re- 
sist and few would dissuade the fatal consequence of his 
resentment, the humane monarch was justly alarmed by the 
consciousness of his infirmity and of his power. It was the 
constant study of his life to suppress or regulate the intem- 
perate sallies of passion ; and the success of his efforts en- 
hanced the merit of his clemency. But the painful virtue 
which claims the merit of victory is exposed to the danger 
of defeat ; and the reign of a wise and merciful prince was 
polluted by an act of cruelty which would stain the annals 
of Nero or Domitian. Within the space of three years, the 
inconsistent historian of Theodosius must relate the gen- 
erous pardon of the citizens of Antioch and the inhuman 
massacre of the people of Thessalonica.* 

* Theodosius, though justly provoked by the contumacy of the 
people of Antioch in casting down and destroying his statues, consulted 
pride rather than justice in the severe measures which he at first pro- 
posed, which would have depopulated Antioch, confiscated its wealth, 
and destroyed its rank as a capital. The punishment of Thessalonica, 
on the other hand, though cruel and excessive, was prompted by a 
cause more adequate. A favorite general, Botheric, was brutally 
assassinated by the turbulent populace in a circus riot. The wrath of 
the outraged emperor was only satiated by a promiscuous massacre of 
from seven to fifteen thousand people. — G. T. F. 



ATTILAy THE SCOURGE OF GOD. §3 

ATTILA, THE SCOURGE OF GOD. 

By EDWARD GIBBON. 

[King of the Huns, the Etzel of German epic and legend, one of the 
greatest conquerors known to history. Date of birth unknown, that 
of death about 454 a. d. The dominion to which he succeeded in- 
cluded the Northern tribes from the Rhine to the Volga. At different 
times he ravaged the whole of Europe, and more than once threatened 
to extirpate Western civilization. The defeat which he suffered at the 
hands of the Roman general -<Etius on the plains of Chalons-sur-Marne 
checked his power, and was probably the most murderous battle ever 
fought in Europe. Attila died from the bursting of an artery after a 
night of debauch, the occasion of the last espousal that swelled the 
army of his countless wives. By some of the chroniclers he is sup- 
posed to have been the victim of the newly married wife's treachery. 
He was buried in triple coffins of iron, silver, and gold.] 

Attila, the son of Mundzuk, deduced his noble, perhaps 
his regal descent from the ancient Huns, who had formerly 
contended with the monarchs of China. His features, ac- 
cording to the observation of a Gothic historian, bore the 
stamp of his national origin; and the portrait of Attila 
exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a 
large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a 
flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, 
and a short, square body, of nervous strength, though of a 
disproportioned form. The haughty step and demeanor of 
the king of the Huns expressed the consciousness of his 
superiority above the rest of mankind ; and he had a custom 
of fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the ter- 
ror which he inspired. Yet this savage hero was not inac- 
cessible to pity ; his suppliant enemies might confide in the 
assurance of peace or pardon ; and Attila was considered by 
his subjects as a just and indulgent master. He delighted 
in war ; but, after he had ascended the throne in a mature 
age, his head rather than his hand achieved the conquest of 



84 GREAT LEADERS, 

the North ; and the fame of an adventurous soldier was use- 
fully exchanged for that of a prudent and successful gen- 
eral. The effects of personal valor are so inconsiderable, 
except in poetry or romance, that victory, even among 
barbarians, must depend upon the degree of skill with which 
the passions of the multitude are combined and guided for 
the service of a single man. The Scythian conquerors, At- 
tila and Zingis, surpassed their rude countrymen in art 
rather than in courage ; and it may be observed that the 
monarchies, both of the Huns and of the Moguls, were 
erected by their founders on the basis of popular super- 
stition. The miraculous conception which fraud and cre- 
dulity ascribed to the virgin mother of Zingis raised him 
above the level of human nature ; and the naked prophet 
who, in the name of the Deity, invested him with the empire 
of the earth, pointed the valor of the Moguls with irresistible 
enthusiasm. The religious arts of Attila were not less skill- 
fully adapted to the character of his age and country. It 
was natural enough that the Scythians should adore with 
peculiar devotion the god of war ; but as they were incapa- 
ble of forming either an abstract idea or a corporeal repre- 
sentation, they worshiped their tutelar deity under the sym- 
bol of an iron cimeter. One of the shepherds of the Huns 
perceived that a heifer who was grazing had wounded her- 
self in the foot, and curiously followed the track of the 
blood till he discovered among the long grass the point of 
an ancient sword, which he dug out of the ground and pre- 
sented to Attila. 

That magnanimous or rather that artful prince accepted 
with pious gratitude this celestial favor, and, as the rightful 
possessor of the stuord of Mars, asserted his divine and inde- 
feasible claim to the dominion of the earth. If the rites of 
Scythia were practiced on this solemn occasion, a lofty altar, 
or rather a pile of faggots, three hundred yards in length 
and in breadth, was raised in a spacious plain, and the sword 
of Mars was placed erect on the summit of this rustic altar, 



ATTILA, THE SCOURGE OF GOD. 85 

which was annually consecrated by the blood of sheep, horses, 
and of the one hundredth captive. Whether human sac- 
rifices formed any part of the worship of Attila, or whether 
he propitiated the god of war with the victims which he 
continually offered in the field of battle, the favorite of Mars 
soon acquired a sacred character, which rendered his con- 
quests more easy and more permanent ; and the barbarian 
princes confessed, in the language of devotion or flattery, 
that they could not presume to gaze with a steady eye on 
the divine majesty of the king of the Huns. His brother, 
Bleda, who reigned over a considerable part of the nation, 
was compelled to resign his scepter and his life. Yet even 
this cruel act was attributed to a supernatural impulse ; and 
the vigor with which Attila wielded the sword of Mars con- 
vinced the world that it had been reserved alone for his 
invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the 
only remaining evidence of the number and importance of 
his victories ; and the Scythian monarch, however ignorant 
of the value of science and philosophy, might perhaps lament 
that his illiterate subjects were destitute of the art which 
could perpetuate the memory of his exploits. 

If a line of separation were drawn between the civilized 
and the savage climates of the globe, between the inhab- 
itants of cities who cultivated the earth and the hunters and 
shepherds who dwelt in tents, Attila might aspire to the 
title of supreme and sole monarch of the barbarians. He 
alone among the conquerors of ancient and modern times 
united the two mighty kingdoms of Germany and Scythia ; 
and those vague appellations, when they are applied to his 
reign, may be understood with an ample latitude. Thu- 
ringia, which stretched beyond its actual limits as far as the 
Danube, was in the number of his provinces ; he interposed, 
with the weight of a powerful neighbor, in the domestic 
affairs of the Franks ; and one of his lieutenants chastised 
and almost exterminated the Burgundians of the Ehine. 
He subdued the islands of the ocean, the kingdoms of Scan- 



SQ GEE AT LEADERS, 

dinavia, encompassed and divided by the waters of the Bal- 
tic ; and the Huns might derive a tribute of furs from that 
northern region which has been protected from all other 
conquerors by the severity of the climate and the courage of 
the natives. Toward the East, it is difficult to circumscribe 
the dominion of Attila over the Scythian deserts ; yet we 
may be assured that he reigned on the banks of the Volga ; 
that the king of the Huns was dreaded, not only as a war- 
rior but as a magician ; that he insulted and vanquished the 
Khan of the formidable Geougen ; and that he sent ambassa- 
dors to negotiate an equal alliance with the Empire of China. 

In the proud review of the nations who acknowledged 
the sovereignty of Attila, and who never entertained during 
his lifetime the thought of a revolt, the GepidaB and the 
Ostrogoths were distinguished by their numbers, their brav- 
ery, and the personal merit of their chiefs. The renowned 
Ardaric, king of the Gepidge, was the faithful and sagacious 
counselor of the monarch, who esteemed his intrepid genius, 
while he loved the mild and discreet virtues of the noble 
Walamir, king of the Ostrogoths. The crowd of vulgar 
kings, the leaders of so many martial tribes who served un- 
der the standard of Attila, were ranged in the submissive 
order of guards and domestics round the person of their 
master. They watched his nod, they trembled at his frown, 
and at the first signal of his will they executed, without 
murmur or hesitation, his stern and absolute commands. 
In time of peace, the dependent princes, with their national 
troops, attended the royal camp in regular succession ; but 
when Attila collected his military force he was able to bring 
into the field an army of five, or, according to another ac- 
count, of seven hundred thousand barbarians. 

In all their invasions of the civilized empires of the 
South, the Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actu- 
ated by a savage and destructive spirit. The laws of war, 
that restrain the exercise of national rapine and murder, are 
founded on two principles of substantial interest ; the knowl- 



ATTILAy TME SCOURGE OF GOD. 87 

edge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained by a 
moderate use of conquest, and a just apprehension lest the 
desokition which we inflict on the enemy's country may be 
retaliated on our own. But these considerations of hope 
and fear are almost unknown in the pastoral state of nations. 
The Huns of Attila may, without injustice, be compared to 
the Moguls and Tartars before their primitive manners 
were changed by religion and luxury ; and the evidence of 
Oriental history may reflect some light on the short and im- 
perfect annals of Rome. After the Moguls had subdued 
the northern provinces of China, it was seriously proposed, 
not in the hour of victory and passion, but in calm, deliber- 
ate council, to exterminate all the inhabitants of that popu- 
lous country, that the vacant land might be converted to 
the pasture of cattle. The firmness of a Chinese mandarin, 
who insinuated some principles of rational policy into the 
mind of Zingis, diverted him from the execution of this 
horrid design. But in the cities of Asia, which yielded to 
the Moguls, the inhuman abuse of the rights of war was 
exercised with a regular form of discipline which may Avith 
equal reason, though not with equal authority, be imputed 
to the victorious Huns. The inhabitants, who had sub- 
mitted to their discretion, were ordered to evacuate their 
houses, and to assemble in some plain adjacent to the city, 
where a division was made of the vanquished into three 
parts. The first class consisted of the soldiers of the garri- 
son and of the young men capable of bearing arms, and 
their fate was instantly decided ; they were either enlisted 
among the Moguls, or they were massacred on the spot by 
the troops, who, with pointed spears and bended bows, had 
formed a circle round the captive multitude. The second 
class, composed of the young and beautiful women, of the 
artificers of every rank and profession, and of the more 
wealthy or honorable citizens, from whom a private ransom 
might be expected, was distributed in equal or proportion- 
able lots. The remainder, whose life or death was alike 



88 QUE AT LEADERS. 

useless to the conquerors, were permitted to return to the 
city — which, in the mean while, had been stripped of its 
valuable furniture — and a tax was imposed on those wretched 
inhabitants for the indulgence of breathing their native air. 
Such was the behavior of the Moguls when they were not 
conscious of any extraordinary rigor. But the most casual 
provocation, the slightest motive, of caprice or convenience, 
often provoked them to involve a whole people in an indis- 
criminate massacre ; and the ruin of some flourishing cities 
was executed with such unrelenting perseverance that, ac- 
cording to their own expression, horses might run without 
stumbling over the ground where they had once stood. 
The three great capitals of Khorasan, Maru, Neisabour, and 
Herat were destroyed by the armies of Zingis ; and the ex- 
act account which was taken of the slain amounted to 
4,347,000 persons. Timur, or Tamerlane, was educated in a 
less barbarous age, and in the profession of the Mohammedan 
religion ; yet if Attila equaled the hostile ravages of Tamer- 
lane, either the Tartar or the Hun might deserve the title of 
" the Scourge of God." 



BELISAEIUS. 

Br LOED MAHON.^ 

[Born about 505 a. d., of Slavonic descent, died 565. He rose from 
a soldier in the imperial guard to the supreme command of the Byzan- 
tine armies. For thirty years the glory and bulwark of the Greek 
empire, his genius for war has been rarely surpassed, and the field of 
his triumphs extended from Persia to Italy and Northern Africa. In 
spite of his priceless services to his sovereign, the envious and treach- 
erous Justinian was careful to deprive him of power and place, when 
the empire could spare his genius at the head of its armies. His name 
has become a synonym for loyalty that no ingratitude could shake. 
He died in poverty and obscurity, though it was in his power any time 
during a score of years to snatch the purple from his unworthy master.] 

In" person Belisarius was tall and commanding, and pre- 
sented a remarkable contrast to the dwarfish and ungainly 



BELISARIUS. 39 

asi^ect of his rival Narses. His features were regular and 
noble, and his appearance in the streets of Constantinople 
after the Vandal and Gothic victories never failed to attract 
the admiration of the people. His character may not un- 
aptly be compared to that of Marlborough, whom he equaled 
in talents and closely resembled in his uxoriousness and love 
of money. As a military leader he was enterprising, firm, 
and fearless; his conception was clear, and his judgment 
rapid and decisive. His conquests were achieved with 
smaller means than any other of like extent recorded in 
history. He frequently experienced reverses in the field, 
but in no case did he fail without some strong and sufficient 
reason for his failure, such as the mutiny of his soldiers, the 
overwhelming number of his antagonists, or his total want 
of necessary supplies ; and it may be observed of him, as of 
Arminius, that sometimes beaten in battle he was never 
overcome in war. His superior tactics covered his defeats, 
retrieved his losses, and prevented his enemies from reaping 
the fruits of victory ; and it is particularly mentioned that 
even in the most dangerous emergencies he never lost his 
presence of mind. 

Among the circumstances which contributed most 
strongly to his success were the kindness which his adver- 
saries met with at his hands, and the strict discipline which 
he maintained among his soldiers. The moderation of Beli- 
sarius appears the more entitled to praise from the fierce- 
ness and disorder usual in his age. It was his first care 
after every victory to extend mercy and protection to the 
vanquished, and to shield their persons and, if possible, their 
property from injury. During a march the trampling of 
the corn-fields by the cavalry was carefully avoided, and the 
troops, as Procopius tells us, seldom ventured even to gather 
an apple from the trees, while a ready payment to the vil- 
lagers for any provisions that they bought made them bless 
the name of Belisarius and secured to the Koman camp a 
plentiful supply. To the soldiers who transgressed these 



90 GREAT LEADERS. 

rules tlie general was stern and unforgiving ; no rank could 
defy, no obscurity could elude liis justice ; and, because he 
punished severely, he had to punish but seldom. But while 
the licentious and turbulent were repressed by the strong 
arm of Belisarius, his liberality cheered and animated the 
deserving. The gift of a gold bracelet or collar rewarded 
any achievement in battle ; the loss of a horse or weapon 
was immediately supplied out of his private funds, and the 
wounded found in him a father and a friend. His private 
virtues promoted and confirmed the discipline of his men ; 
none ever saw him overcome with wine, and the charms of 
the fairest captives from the Goths or Vandals could not 
overcome his conjugal fidelity. 

But the most striking and peculiar feature in the char- 
acter of Belisarius, as compared with that of other illustrious 
generals, was his enduring and unconquerable loyalty. He 
was doubtless bound to Justinian by many ties of gratitude, 
and the suspicion entertained of him in Africa may be consid- 
ered as fully counterbalanced by the triumph and other hon- 
ors which awaited his return. But from the siege of Eavenna 
till his final departure from Italy he was, almost without in- 
termission, exposed to the most galling and unworthy treat- 
ment ; he was insulted, degraded, and despised ; he was 
even attacked in his fame, when restored to an important 
station, without any means for discharging its duties and 
for sustaining his former reputation. It would be difficult 
to repeat another instance of such signal and repeated in- 
gratitude unless in republics, where from the very nature of 
the government no crime is so dangerous or so well pun- 
ished as serving the state too well. When we consider the 
frequency and therefore the ease of revolutions in this age, 
the want of hereditary right in the imperial family, the 
strong attachment of the soldiers to their victorious general, 
while the person of Justinian was hateful even to his own 
domestic guards, it will, I think, be admitted that a rebellion 
by Belisarius must have proved successful and secure. On 



BELISARIUS. 91 

no occasion was he roused into the slightest mark of dis- 
obedience or resentment ; he bore every injury with un- 
changed submission ; he resisted the feelings of indignation, 
of revenge, of self-interest, and even the thirst for glory, 
which, according to Tacitus, is of all frailties the longest 
retained by the wise. Besides him, no more than six gener- 
als have been named by one of our most judicious critics as 
having deserved, without having worn a crown ; * and the 
smallness of this number should display the difficulty of 
withstanding this brilliant temptation and enhance the repu- 
tation of those who have withstood it. 

The chief fault of Belisarius seems to have been his un- 
bounded deference and submission to his wife, which ren- 
dered him strangely blind and afterward weakly forgiving 
to her infidelity. But its mischievous effects were not con- 
fined to private life, and nearly all the errors which can be 
charged upon his public career are imputed to this cause. 
It was Antonina who assumed the principal part in the 
deposition of the Pope, who urged the death of Constantine, 
who promoted the prosecution of Photius ; and in his whole 
conduct with regard to that worthless woman Belisarius 
appears alternately the object of censure or ridicule. His 
confidence in her must have tended to lower his official 
character, to fetter and mislead his judgment, and to pre- 
vent his justice and impartiality whenever her passions were 
concerned. The second reproach to which the character of 
Belisarius appears liable is that of rapacity in the latter part 
of his career. How highly would his fame have been ex- 
alted by an' honorable poverty, and how much would the 
animosity of his enemies at court have abated, had they seen 
no spoils to gather from his fall ! 

The life of Belisarius produced most important effects 

* The characters mentioned by Sir William Temple, the author 
alluded to, are Belisarius, -^tius, John Hunniades, Gonsalvo of Cor- 
dova, Scanderbeg, Alexander Duke of Parma, and the Prince of 
Orange. 



92 GREAT LEADERS, 

on the political and social revolutions of the world. I have 
already endeavored to show that his reduction of Africa 
probably contributed to the rapid progress of the Mussul- 
mans, but this and his other victories probably saved his 
country from impending ruin. During the fifth century 
more than half the provinces of the ancient empire had been 
usurped by the barbarians, and the rising tide of their con- 
quests must soon have overwhelmed the remainder. The 
decline of the Byzantine Eomans was threatened by the 
youthful vigor of the Vandal and Ostrogothic kingdoms. 
Although the founders of these mighty monarchies had 
been wisely solicitous for peace, they left their successors 
fully able to undertake any projects of invasion; and an 
alliance of these states against the Eomans must have been 
fatal to the last. Had not Belisarius arisen at this particu- 
lar juncture the Vandals, Goths, and Persians would in all 
likelihood have divided the imperial provinces among them. 
The Arian doctrines, of which the two former were zealous 
partisans, would then probably have prevailed in the Chris- 
tian world, the whole balance of power in Europe would 
have undergone incalculable changes, and the treasures of 
Greek and Eoman genius would never have enlightened 
modern times. 



MOHAMMED,* THE FOUNDER OF 
ISLAM. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Born 570 or 571 A. d., died 632. Like all the upper classes of 
Mecca, his birthplace, the future prophet devoted himself to commer- 
cial pursuits, and in his twenty-fifth year he married the rich widow 
whose business he supervised. It was not till his fortieth year that he 

* Gibbon, while recognizing the correct orthography of the name 
Mohammed, prefers to use the then popular substitute of *' Mahomet," 
as that by which the Arabian prophet was almost universally known. 
— G. T. F. 




MOHAMMED. 



MOHAMMED, THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM. 93 

announced to the world his heavenly mission, his first conrerts being 
his wife and his uncle Abu Taleb. He was compelled to fly from 
Mecca to Medina, and the year of the flight known as the " Ilegira," 
633 A. D., is the foundation of the Mohammedan era. Within a decade 
Mohammed converted nearly the whole of Arabia to his new religion, 
and the dominion of his successors was spread with a rapidity which 
is among the marvels of history.] 

The plebeian birtli of Mahomet is an unskillful calumny 
of the Christians, who exalt instead of degrading the merit 
of their adversary. His descent from Ishmael was a national 
privilege or fable ; but if the first steps of the pedigree are 
dark and doubtful, he could produce many generations of 
pure and genuine nobility ; he sprung from the tribe of 
Koreish and the family of Hashem, the most illustrious 
of the Arabs, the princes of Mecca, and the hereditary 
guardians of the Caaba. The grandfather of Mahomet 
was Abdol Motalleb, the son of Hashem, a wealthy and 
generous citizen who relieved the distress of famine with 
the supplies of commerce. Mecca, which had been fed by 
the liberality of the father, was saved by the courage of the 
son. The kingdom of Yemen was subject to the Christian 
princes of Abyssinia ; their vassal Abrahah was provoked 
by an insult to avenge the honor of the cross ; and the holy 
city was invested by a train of elephants and an army of 
Africans. A treaty was proposed, and in the first audience 
the grandfather of Mahomet demanded the restitution of 
his cattle. " And why," said Abrahah, " do you not rather 
implore my clemency in favor of your temple, which I have 
threatened to destroy ? " " Because," replied the intrepid 
chief, the cattle is my own ; the Caaba belongs to the gods, 
and they will defend their house from injury and sacrilege." 
The want of provisions, or the valor of the Koreish, com- 
pelled the Abyssinians to a disgraceful retreat ; their discom- 
fiture has been adorned with a miraculous flight of birds, 
who showered down stones on the heads of the infidels ; and 
the deliverance was long commemorated by the era of the 
elephant. 



94 ORE AT LEADERS. 

The glory of Abdol Motalleb was crowned with domestic 
happiness, his life was prolonged to the age of one hundred 
and ten years, and he became the father of six daughters and 
thirteen sons. His best beloved Abdallah was the most beau- 
tiful and modest of the Arabian youth. Mahomet, or more 
properly Mohammed, the only son of Abdallah and Amina, 
of the noble race of the Zahrites, was born at Mecca, four 
years after the death of Justinian. In his early infancy he 
was deprived of his father, his mother, and his grandfather ; 
his uncles were strong and numerous ; and in the division 
of the inheritance the orphan's share was reduced to five 
camels and an Ethiopian maid - servant. At home and 
abroad, in peace and war, Abu Taleb, the most respectable 
of his uncles, was the guide and guardian of his youth ; in 
his twenty-fifth year he entered into the service of Cadijah, 
a rich and noble widow of Mecca, who soon rewarded his 
fidelity with the gift of her hand and fortune. The mar- 
riage contract, in the simple style of antiquity, recites the 
mutual love of Mahomet and Cadijah ; describes him as the 
most accomplished of the tribe of Koreish ; and stipulates a 
dowry of twelve ounces of gold and twenty camels, which 
was supplied by the liberality of his uncle. By this alliance 
the son of Abdallah was restored to the station of his ances- 
tors, and the judicious matron was content with his domes- 
tic virtues, till, in the fortieth year of his age, he assumed 
the title of a prophet and proclaimed the religion of the 
Koran. 

According to the tradition of his companions, Mahomet 
was distinguished by the beauty of his person, an outward 
gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it 
has been refused. Before he spoke, the orator engaged on 
his side the affections of a public or private audience. They 
applauded his commanding presence, his majestic aspect, 
his piercing eye, his gracious smile, his flowing beard, his 
countenance that painted every sensation of the soul, and 
his gestures that enforced each expression of the tongue. 



MOHAMMED, THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM. 95 

In the familiar offices of life lie scrupulously adhered to the 
grave and ceremonious politeness of his country ; his respect- 
ful attention to the rich and powerful was dignified by his 
condescension and affability to the poorest citizens of Mecca ; 
the frankness of his manner concealed the artifice of his 
views, and the habits of courtesy were imputed to personal 
friendship or universal benevolence. His memory was capa- 
cious and retentive, his wit easy and social, his imagination 
sublime, his judgment clear, rapid, and decisive. He pos- 
sessed the courage both of thought and action ; and, although 
his designs might gradually expand with his success, the first 
idea which he entertained of his divine mission bears the 
stamp of an original and superior genius. The son of Ab- 
dallah was educated in the bosom of the noblest race, in the 
use of the purest dialect of Arabia ; and the fluency of his 
speech was corrected and enhanced by the practice of dis- 
creet and seasonable silence. With these powers of elo- 
quence Mahomet was an illiterate barbarian ; his youth had 
never been instructed in the arts of reading and writing ; 
the common ignorance exempted him from shame or re- 
proach, but he was reduced to a narrow circle of existence, 
and deprived of those faithful mirrors which reflect to our 
mind the minds of sages and heroes. Yet the book of 
nature and of man was open to his view ; and some fancy 
has been indulged in the political and philosophical obser- 
vations which are ascribed to the Arabian traveler. He 
compares the nations and the religions of the earth ; dis- 
covers the weakness of the Persian and Roman monarchies ; 
beholds, with pity and indignation, the degeneracy of the 
times ; and resolves to unite, under one God and one king, 
the invincible sjDirit and primitive virtues of the Arabs. Our 
more accurate inquiry will suggest that, instead of visiting 
the courts, the camps, the temples of the East, the two jour- 
neys of Mahomet into Syria were confined to the fairs of 
Bostra and Damascus ; that he was only thirteen years of 
age when he accompanied the caravan of his uncle ; and that 



96 GREAT LEADERS. 

his duty compelled him to return as soon as he had disposed 
of the merchandise of Oadijah. In these hasty and super- 
ficial excursions the eye of genius might discern some objects 
invisible to his grosser companions ; some seeds of knowl- 
edge might be cast upon a fruitful soil ; but his ignorance 
of the Syriac language must have checked his curiosity, and 
I can not perceive in the life or writings of Mahomet that 
his prospect was far extended beyond the limits of the Ara- 
bian world. 

From every region of that solitary world the pilgrims of 
Mecca were annually assembled by the calls of devotion and 
commerce ; in the free concourse of multitudes, a simple 
citizen, in his native tongue, might study the political state 
and character of the tribes, the theory and practice of the 
Jews and Christians. Some useful strangers might be 
tempted, or forced, to implore the rights of hospitality ; 
and the enemies of Mahomet have named the Jew, the Per- 
sian, and the Syrian monk whom they accuse of lending 
their secret aid to the composition of the Koran. Conver- 
sation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school 
of genius ; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand 
of a single artist. From his earliest youth Mahomet was 
addicted to religious contemplation ; each year, during the 
month of Eamadan, he withdrew from the world and from 
the arms of Cadijah ; in the cave of Hera, three miles from 
Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm, whose 
abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet. 
The faith which, under the name of Islam, he preached to 
his family and nation, is compounded of an eternal truth 
and a necessary fiction, that there is only 07ie God, and that 
Mahomet is the apostle of God. 

It may, perhaps, be expected that I should balance his 
faults and virtues, that I should decide whether the title of 
enthusiast or impostor more projoerly belongs to that ex- 
traordinary man. Had I been intimately conversant with 
the son of Abdallah, the task would still be difficult, and 



M0HAM3IED, THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM. 97 

the success uncertain \ at the distance of twelve centuries, I 
darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious 
incense ; and could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, 
the fleeting resemblance would not equally apply to the soli- 
tary of Mount Hera, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the 
conqueror of Arabia. The author of a mighty revolution 
appears to have been endowed with a pious and contempla- 
tive disposition ; so soon as marriage had raised him above 
the pressure of want, he avoided the paths of ambition and 
avarice ; and till the age of forty he lived with innocence, 
and would have died without a name. The unity of God is 
an idea most congenial to nature and reason ; and a slight 
conversation with the Jews and Christians would teach him 
to despise and detest the idolatry of Mecca. It was the duty 
of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, to 
rescue his country from the dominion of sin and error. The 
energy of a mind incessantly bent on the same object would 
convert a general obligation into a particular call ; the warm 
suggestions of the understanding or the fancy would be felt 
as the inspirations of heaven ; the labor of thought would 
expire in rapture and vision ; and the inward sensation, the 
invisible monitor, would be described with the form and 
attributes of an angel of God. 

From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and 
slippery ; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable in- 
stance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good 
man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber 
in a mixed and middle state between self -illusion and vol- 
untary fraud. Charity may believe that the original motives 
of Mahomet were those of pure and genuine benevolence ; 
but a human missionary is incapable of cherishing the obsti- 
nate unbelievers who reject his claims, despise his arguments, 
and persecute his life ; he might forgive his personal adver- 
saries, he may lawfully hate the enemies of God ; the stern 
passions of pride and revenge were kindled in the bosom of 
Mahomet, and he sighed, like the prophet of Nineveh, for 
5 



98 GREAT LEADERS. 

the destruction of the rebels whom he had condemned. The 
injustice of Mecca and the choice of Medina transformed 
the citizen into a prince, the humble preacher into the leader 
of armies ; but his sword was consecrated by the example of 
the saints, and the same God who afflicts a sinful world with 
pestilence and earthquakes might inspire for their conver- 
sion or chastisement the valor of his servants. In the exer- 
cise of political government he was compelled to abate of 
the stern rigor of fanaticism, to comply in some measure 
with the prejudices and passions of his followers, and to 
employ even the vices of mankind as the instruments of 
their salvation. The use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty 
and injustice, were often subservient to the propagation of 
the faith ; and Mahomet commanded or approved the assassi- 
nation of the Jews and idolaters who had escaped from the 
field of battle. By the repetition of such acts the character 
of Mahomet must have been gradually stained, and the influ- 
ence of such pernicious habits would be poorly compensated 
by the practice of the personal and social virtues which are 
necessary to maintain the reputation of a prophet among 
his secretaries and friends. 

Of his last years ambition was the ruling passion ; and a 
politician will suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious 
impostor ! ) at the enthusiasm of his youth and the credulity 
of his proselytes, A philosopher will observe that their cru- 
elty and Ids success would tend more strongly to fortify the 
assurance of his divine mission, that his interest and religion 
were inseparably connected, and that his conscience would 
be soothed by the persuasion that he alone was absolved by 
the Deity from the obligation of positive and moral laws. 
If he retained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins 
of Mahomet may be allowed as an evidence of his sincerity. 
In the support of truth the arts of fraud and fiction may be 
deemed less criminal, and he would have started at the foul- 
ness of the means had he not been satisfied of the impor- 
tance and justice of the end. Even in a conqueror or a 



M0HA3IMED, THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM. 99 

priest, I can surprise a word or action of unaffected hu- 
manity ; and the decree of Mahomet that, in the sale of 
captives, the mothers should never be separated from their 
children, may suspend or moderate the censure of the his- 
torian. 

The good sense of Mahomet despised the pomp of roy- 
alty ; the apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of 
the family ; he kindled the fire, swept the floor, milked the 
ewes, and mended with his own hands his shoes and his 
woolen garment. Disdaining the penance and merit of a 
hermit, he observed, without effort or vanity, the abstemious 
diet of an Arab and a soldier. On solemn occasions he 
feasted his companions with rustic and hospitable plenty ; 
but in his domestic life, many weeks would elapse without 
a fire being kindled on the hearth of the prophet. The in- 
terdiction of wine was confirmed by his example ; his hun- 
ger was appeased with a sparing allowance of barley bread ; 
he delighted in the taste of milk and honey, but his ordi- 
nary food consisted of dates and water. Perfumes and 
women were the two sensual enjoyments which his nature 
required and his religion did not forbid. Their incon- 
tinence was regulated by the civil and religious laws of 
the Koran ; their incestuous alliances were blamed, the 
boundless license of polygamy was reduced to four legiti- 
mate wives or concubines ; their rights, both of bed and of 
dowry, were equitably determined ; the freedom of divorce 
was discouraged, adultery was condemned as a capital 
offense, and fornication in either sex was punished with 
a hundred stripes. Such were the calm and rational pre- 
cepts of the legislator ; but in his private conduct Mahomet 
indulged the appetites of a man, and abused the claims of 
a prophet. The youth, the beauty, the spirit of Ayesha, 
gave her a superior ascendant ; she was beloved and trusted 
by the prophet, and after his death the daughter of Abu- 
beker was long revered as the mother of the faithful. Dur- 
ing the twenty-four years of the marriage of Mahomet with 



100 GREAT LEADERS, 

Cadijah, her youthful husband abstained from the right of 
polygamy, and the pride or tenderness of the venerable ma- 
tron was never insulted by the society of a rival. After her 
death he placed her in the rank of the four perfect women 
— with the sister of Moses, the mother of Jesus, and Fatima, 
the best beloved of his daughters. " Was she not old ? " 
said Ayesha, with the insolence of a blooming beauty ; " has 
not God given you a better in her place ? " " No, by God,'* 
said Mahomet, with an effusion of honest gratitude, " there 
never can be a better ! she believed in me when men de- 
spised me ; she relieved my wants when I was poor and per- 
secuted by the world." 



CHAKLEMAGNE. 

By sir JAMES STEPHEN. 

[Otherwise known as Charles I, or Charles the Great, Emperor of 
the West and King of France, born 743 a. d., died 814. Grandson of 
Charles Martel and son of Pepin, who, under the titular rank of Mayor 
of the Palace and Duke of Austrasia, had exercised the substantial 
functions of French sovereignty during the closing days of the Mero- 
vingian kings. Charlemagne was the true founder of the Carlovingian 
dynasty, and was by conquest the ruler over much of what is now 
Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. He is one of 
the colossal figures in early European history. But even his genius, 
though gifted with the finest traits of the soldier, administrator, and 
law-maker, could not delay that tremendous revolution of society, 
which intervened between the collapse of the' old Roman system and 
the establishment of feudalism. The most important events of his 
reign were the subjugation and conversion of the Saxons and the re- 
establishment of the Western Empire.] 

The political maxims which Charlemagne acquired by 
tradition and inheritance had, to a certain extent, become 
obsolete when he himself succeeded to the power of his 
ancestors and to the crown of his father, Pepin. It was then 
no longer necessary to practice those hereditary arts with a 




CHARLEMAGNE. 



CHARLEMAGNE, 101 

view to the great prize to which they had so long been sub- 
servient. But the maxims by which the Carlovingian scep- 
ter had been won were not less necessary in order to defend 
and to retain it. They afford the key to more than half 
the history of the great conqueror from whom that dynasty 
derives its name. The cardinal points to which throughout 
his long and glorious reign his mind was directed with an 
inflexible tenacity of purpose, were precisely those toward 
which his forefathers had bent their attention. They were 
to conciliate the attachment of his German subjects by stu- 
diously maintaining their old German institutions ; to an- 
ticipate instead of awaiting the invasions of the barbarous 
nations by whom he was surrounded ; to court the alliance 
and support of all other secular potentates of the East and 
West ; and to strengthen his own power by the most inti- 
mate relations with tlie Church. 

I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had 
other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous 
growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of sur- 
passing depth and fertility that such maxims could have 
been nurtured and made to yield their appropriate fruits ; 
for, first, he firmly believed that the power of his house 
could have no secure basis except in the religious, moral, 
intellectual, and social improvement of his subjects ; and, 
secondly, he was no less firmly persuaded that in order 
to effect that improvement it was necessary to consolidate 
all temporal authority in Europe by the reconstruction of 
the Caesarian empire — that empire beneath the shelter of 
which religion, law, and learning had so long and so widely 
flourished throughout the dominions of imperial Rome. 

Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom 
the title of "the Great" had been given, Charlemagne 
alone has retained it as a permanent addition to his name. 
The reason may, perhaps, be that in no other man were 
ever united in so large a measure, and in such perfect har- 
mony, the qualities which, in their combination, constitute 



102 GREAT LEADERS. 

the heroic character, such as energy, or the love of action ; 
ambition, or the love of power ; curiosity, or the love of 
knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of pleasure — not, 
indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of enervat- 
ing pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights 
by which the burdened mind and jaded s|)irits recruit and 
renovate their powers — delights of which none are sus- 
ceptible in the highest degree but those whose more serious 
pursuits are sustained by the highest motives and directed 
toward the highest ends; for the charms of social inter- 
course, the play of buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of hon- 
est mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, 
require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and abso- 
lute health of body and of mind, which none but the 
noblest natures possess and in the possession of which 
Charlemagne exceeded all other men. 

His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and 
brilliant eyes, and the dome - like structure of his head 
imparted, as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes 
the dignity which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful 
activity of a practiced warrior. He was still a stranger to 
every form of bodily disease when he entered his seventieth 
year ; and although he was thenceforward constrained to 
pay the usual tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained 
to the last a contempt for the whole materia medica, and 
for the dispensers of it, which Moliere himself, in his gay- 
est mood, might have envied. In defiance of the gout, he 
still followed the chase, and still provoked his comrades to 
emulate his feats in swimming, as though the iron frame 
which had endured nearly threescore campaigns had been 
incapable of lassitude and exempt from decay. 

In the monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, 
there was living in the ninth century a monk who relieved 
the tedium of his monotonous life and got the better, as he 
tells us, of much constitutional laziness by collecting anec- 
dotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories 



CHARLE3IAGNE, 103 

the world was at that time ringing. In this amusing legend 
Charlemagne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of 
learning, and the restorer of the empire, makes way for 
Charlemagne, the joyous companion, amusing himself with 
the comedy or rather with the farce of life, and contributing 
to it not a few practical jokes, which stand in most whimsical 
contrast with the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, 
when he commands a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, 
plumed and furred and silken as they stood, to follow him 
in the chase through sleet and tempest, mud and brambles ; 
or constrains an unhappy chorister, who had forgotten his 
responses, to imitate the other members of the choir by a 
long series of mute grimaces ; or concerts with a Jew peddler 
a scheme for palming off, at an enormous price, on an Epis- 
copal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as an animal till then un- 
known to any naturalist — these, and many similar facetiae, 
which in any other hands might have seemed mere childish 
frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious author of them, 
that native alacrity of spirit and child-like glee, which 
neither age nor cares nor toil could subdue, and which 
not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to suffo- 
cate. 

Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after 
whim or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over 
the interior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had 
been borne on men's shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, 
to accompany his father in his wars ; and in later life, he 
had many a strange tale to tell of his father's achievements. 
With his mother, Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in affec- 
tionate and reverend intimacy, which never knew a pause 
except on one occasion, which may perhaps apologize for 
some breach even of filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted 
on giving him a wife against his own consent. His own 
parental affections were indulged too fondly and too long, 
and were fatal both to the immediate objects of them and 
to his own tranquillity. But with Eginhard and Alcuin 



104: GREAT LEADERS. 

and the other associates of his severer labors, he main- 
tained that grave and enduring friendship, which can be 
created only on the basis of the most profound esteem, 
and which can be developed only by that free interchange 
of thought and feeling which implies the temporary for- 
getfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank and 
dignity. 

It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform, 
with such revolting obscenities, the pages in which he waged 
his disingenuous warfare against the one great purifying 
influence of human society. It may also have been retribu- 
tive justice which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be 
overshadowed by the foul and unmerited reproach on which 
Gibbon dwells with such offensive levity ; for the monarch 
was habitually regardless of that law, at once so strict and 
so benignant, which has rendered chastity the very bond of 
domestic love and happiness and peace. In bursting through 
the restraints of virtue, Charlemagne was probably the will- 
ing victim of a transparent sophistry. From a nature so 
singularly constituted as his, sweet waters or bitter might 
flow with equal promptitude. That peculiarity of tempera- 
ment in which his virtues and his vices found their com- 
mon root probably confounded the distinctions of good and 
evil in his self -judgments, and induced him to think lightly 
of the excesses of a disposition so often conducting him to 
the most noble and magnanimous enterprises ; for such was 
the revelry of his animal life, so inexhaustible his nervous 
energies, so intense the vibrations of each successive impulse 
along the chords of his sensitive nature, so insatiable his 
thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impatience of 
repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase, 
composed verses or listened to homilies, fought or nego- 
tiated, cast down thrones or built them up, studied, con- 
versed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were 
the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an 
inert, visionary, and somnolent generation. 



CHARLEMAGNE. 105 

The rank held by Charlemagne among great command- 
ers was achieved far more by this strange and almost super- 
human activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the 
art or science of war. He was seldom engaged in any gen- 
eral action, and never undertook any considerable siege, 
excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than 
a protracted blockade ; but, during forty-six years of almost 
unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of 
Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hun- 
gary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of 
movement and such a decision of purpose that no power, 
civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment with- 
out rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible 
blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that 
he seldom if ever encountered in the field a really formi- 
dable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military 
skill animated by his sleepless energy, the countless assail- 
ants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have be- 
come too formidable for resistance ; for to Charlemagne is 
due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by 
which a general compensates for the numerical inferiority 
of his own forces to those of his antagonists — the art of 
moving detached bodies of men along remote but converg- 
ing lines with such mutual concert as to throw their uijited 
forces at the same moment on any meditated point of at- 
tack. Neither the Alpine marches of Hannibal nor those 
of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight or exe- 
cuted with greater precision than the simultaneous passages 
of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mount- 
ain-ranges, and their ultimate union in the vicinity of their 
Lombard enemies. 

But though many generals have eclipsed the fame of 
Charlemagne as a strategist, no one ever rivaled his inflexible 
perseverance as a conqueror. The Carlovingian crown may 
indeed be said to have been worn on the tenure of continual 
conquests. It was on that condition alone that the family 



106 GREAT LEADERS. 

of Pepin of Heristal could vindicate the deposition of the 
Merovings and the pre-eminence of the Anstrasian people ; 
and each member of that family, in his turn, gave an ex- 
ample of obedience to that law, or tradition, of their house. 
But by none of them was it so well observed as by Charle- 
magne himself. From his first expedition to his last there 
intervened forty-six years, no one of which he passed in 
perfect peace, nor without some military triumph. In six 
months he reduced into obedience the great province or 
kingdom of Aquitaine. In less than two years he drove the 
Lombard king into a monastic exile, placing on his own 
brows the iron crown, and with it the sovereignty over 
nearly all the Italian peninsula. During thirty- three suc- 
cessive summers he invaded the great Saxon confederacy, 
until the deluge of barbarism with which they threaten 
southern Europe was effectually and forever repressed. 

It has been alleged, indeed, that the Saxon wars were 
waged in the spirit of fanaticism, and that the vicar of 
Christ placed the sword of Mohammed in the hands of the 
sovereign of the Franks. It is, I think, an unfounded 
charge, though sanctioned by Gibbon and by Warburton, 
and by names of perhaps even greater authority than theirs. 
That the alternative, " believe or die," was sometimes pro- 
posejl by Charlemagne to the Saxons, I shall not, indeed, 
dispute. But it is not less true that, before these terms 
were tendered to them, they had again and again rejected 
his less formidable proposal, " be quiet and live." In form 
and in terms, indeed, their election lay between the Gospel 
and the sword. In substance and in reality, they had to 
make their choice between submission and destruction. A 
long and deplorable experience had already shown that the 
Frankish people had neither peace nor security to expect 
for a single year, so long as their Saxon neighbors retained 
their heathen rites and the ferocious barbarism inseparable 
from them. Fearful as may be the dilemma, " submit or 
perish," it is that to which every nation, even in our own 




ALFRED THE GREAT. 



ALFRED THE ORE AT, OF ENGLAND. 107 

times, endeavors to reduce a host of invading and desolat- 
ing foes ; nor, if we ourselves were now exposed to similar 
inroads, should we offer to our assailants conditions more 
gentle or less peremptory. 



ALFRED THE GREAT, OF ENGLAND. 

By DAVID HUME. 

[Hereditary King of the West Saxons, and Over-king of all Eng- 
land, born in 849 a. d., died 901. Alfred was the true founder of the 
English monarchy, and one of the greatest monarchs in English his- 
tory. In his reign the English became essentially one people, and the 
Danish invaders then settled in England were incorporated with the 
Saxons. Alfred was not only a great soldier and statesman, but was 
distinguished for intellectual greatness in the pursuit of arts and let- 
ters. Under his patronage the Saxon court became the source of civil- 
izing influences that extended over all Northern and Western Europe.] 

The merit of this prince both in private and public life 
may with advantage be set in opposition to that of any 
monarch or citizen which the annals of any age or nation 
can present to us. He seems, indeed, to be the model of 
that perfect character which, under the denomination of 
sage or wise man, philosophers have been fond of delineat- 
ing rather as a fiction of their own imagination than in 
hopes of seeing it existing, so happily were all his virtues 
tempered together, so justly were they blended, and so pow- 
erfully did each prevent the other from exceeding its proper 
boundaries. He knew how to reconcile the most enterpris- 
ing spirit with the coolest moderation, the most obstinate 
perseverance with the easiest flexibility; the most severe 
justice with the gentlest lenity ; the greatest vigor in com- 
manding with the most perfect affability of deportment; 
the highest capacity and inclination for science with^ the 
most shining talents for action. His civil and his military 



108 GREAT LEADERS. 

virtues are almost equally the objects of our admiration, 
excepting only that the former being more rare among 
princes as well as more useful seem chiefly to challenge our 
applause. 

Nature, also, as if desirous that so bright a production 
of her skill should be set in the fairest light, had bestowed 
on him every bodily accomplishment — vigor of limbs, dig- 
nity of air and shape, with a pleasant, engaging, and open 
countenance. Fortune alone by throwing him into that 
barbarous age deprived him of historians worthy to transmit 
his fame to posterity ; and we wish to see him delineated in 
more lively colors, and with more peculiar strokes, that we 
may at least perceive some of those specks and blemishes 
from which as a man it is impossible he could be entirely 
exempted. 

The better to guide the magistrates in the administration 
of justice, Alfred framed a body of laws, which, though now 
lost, served long as the basis of English jurisprudence, and 
is generally deemed the origin of what is denominated the 
Common Law. The similarity of these institutions to the 
customs of the ancient Germans, to the practice of the other 
Northern conquerors, and to the Saxon laws during the 
heptarchy, prevents us from regarding Alfred as the sole 
author of this plan of government, and leads us rather to 
think that, like a wise man, he contented himself with re- 
forming, extending, and executing the institutions which he 
found previously established. 

But on the whole such success attended his legislation 
that everything bore suddenly a new face in England. Eob- 
beries and iniquities of all kinds were repressed by the pun- 
ishment or reformation of criminals ; and so exact was the 
general police that Alfred, it is said, hung up by way of 
bravado golden bracelets near the highways, and no man 
dared touch them. Yet, amid these rigors of justice, this 
great prince preserved the most sacred regard to the liberties 
of the people ; and it is a memorable sentiment preserved in 



ALFRED THE GREAT, OF ENGLAND, 109 

his will that it was just the English should ever remain as 
free as their own thoughts. 

As good morals and knowledge are almost inseparable in 
every age, though not in every individual, the care of Alfred 
for the encouragement of learning among his subjects was 
another useful branch of his legislation, and tended to re- 
cltiim the English from their former dissolute and ferocious 
manners. But the king was guided in this pursuit less by 
political views than by his natural bent and propensity to- 
ward letters. 

AVhen he came to the throne he found the nation sunk 
into the grossest ignorance and barbarism, proceeding from 
the continued disorders in the government and from the 
ravages of the Danes. The monasteries were destroyed, the 
monks butchered or dispersed, their libraries burned, and 
thus the only seats of erudition in those ages were totally 
subverted. Alfred himself complains that on his accession 
he knew not one person south of the Thames who could so 
much as interpret the Latin service, and very few in the 
northern parts who had reached even that pitch of erudition. 
But this prince invited over the most celebrated scholars 
from all parts of Europe ; he established schools everywhere 
for the instruction of his people ; he founded — at least re- 
paired — the University of Oxford, and endowed it with 
many privileges, revenues, and immunities. He gave pre- 
ferment both in Church and state to such only as made 
some proficiency in knowledge. 

But the most effectual expedient adopted by Alfred for 
the encouragement of learning was his own example, and 
the constant assiduity with which, notwithstanding the mul- 
tiplicity and urgency of his affairs, he employed himself in 
the pursuit of knowledge. He usually divided his time into 
three equal portions — one was employed in sleep, and the 
refection of his body by diet and exercise ; another, in the 
dispatch of business ; a third, in study and devotion. And 
that he might more exactly measure the hours, he made use 



110 GREAT LEADERS. 

of burning tapers of equal length, which he fixed in lanterns 
— an expedient suited to that rude age, when the geome- 
try of dialing and the mechanism of clocks and w^atches 
were entirely unknown. And by such a regular distribution 
of his time, though he often labored under great bodily in- 
firmities, this martial hero who fought in person fifty-six 
battles by sea and land, was able, during a life of no ex- 
traordinary length, to acquire more knowledge, and even to 
compose more books, than most studious men, though blessed 
with greatest leisure and application, have in more fortu- 
nate ages made the object of their uninterrupted industry. 
And he deemed it no wise derogatory from his other great 
characters of sovereign, legislator, warrior, and politician 
thus to lead the way to his people in the pursuit of liter- 
ature. 

He invited from all quarters industrious foreigners to 
repeople his country, which had been desolated by the rav- 
ages of the Danes. He introduced and encouraged manu- 
factures of all kinds, and no inventor or improver of any 
ingenious art did he suffer to go unrewarded. He prompted 
men of activity to betake themselves to navigation, to push 
commerce into the most remote countries, and to acquire 
riches by propagating industry among their fellow-citizens. 
He set apart a seventh portion of his own revenue for main- 
taining a number of workmen, whom he constantly em- 
ployed in rebuilding the ruined cities, castles, palaces, and 
monasteries. Even the elegancies of life were brought to 
him from the Mediterranean and the Indies ; and his sub- 
jects, by seeing those productions of the peaceful arts, were 
taught to respect the virtues of justice and industry, from 
which alone they could rise. Both living and dead Alfred 
was regarded by foreigners, no less than by his own subjects, 
as the greatest prince after Charlemagne that appeared in 
Europe during several ages, and as one of the wisest and 
best that had ever adorned the annals of any nation. 



OLAF TRYGGVESON, KING OF NORWAY. m 



OLAF TEYGGVESON, KING OF 
NORWAY. 

By THOMAS CAELYLE. 

[Earliest of the Norwegian kings who succeeded in implanting 
Christianity in the soil of Norse paganism. Exact date of birth un- 
known ; died 1000 a. d. Son of Tryggve, a former under-king, or jarl, 
of Norway, slain by Hakon Jarl, who had usurped the supreme power 
about 975. Olaf spent his early years as a sea-rover, and became the 
most celebrated viking of his age^ He conquered and slew Hakon in 
995, and became king. During his reign of five years he revolution- 
ized his kingdom. He lost his life in a great sea-battle with the com- 
bined fleets of Denmark and^JiferWl&y. The facts of his career are 
mostly drawn from the saga of SnoirTo Sturleson.] 

Tryggveson" made a stout and, in effect, victorious and 
glorious struggle for himself as king. Daily and hourly vigi- 
lant to do so, often enough by soft and even merry methods 
— for he was a witty, jocund man, and had a fine ringing 
laugh in him, and clear, pregnant words ever ready — or, if 
soft methods would not serve, then by hard and even hard- 
est he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in 
Norway, was especially busy against heathenism (devil-wor- 
ship and its rites) ; this, indeed, may be called the focus and 
heart of all his royal endeavor in Norway, and of all the 
troubles he now had with his people there. For this was a 
serious, vital, all-comprehending matter; devil-worship, a 
thing not to be tolerated one moment longer than you could 
by any method help ! Olaf 's success was intermittent, of 
varying complexion, but his effort, swift or slow, was strong 
and continual, and, on the whole, he did succeed. Take a 
sample of that wonderful conversion process : 

Once, in beginning a parliamentary address, so soon as 
he came to touch upon Christianity the Bonders rose in 
murmurs, in vociferations and jingling of arms, which quite 



112 GREAT LEADERS. 

drowned the royal voice; declared they had taken arms 
against King Hakon the Good to compel him to desist from 
his Christian proposals, and they did not think King Olaf 
a higher man than him (Hakon the Good). The king then 
said, "He purposed coming to them next Yule to their 
great sacrificial feast to see for himself what their customs 
were," which pacified the Bonders for this time. The ap- 
pointed place of meeting was again a Hakon-Jarl Temple, 
not yet done to ruin, chief shrine in those Trondhjem parts, 
I believe ; there should Tryggveson appear at Yule. Well, 
but before Yule came, Tryggveson made a great banquet in 
his palace at Trondhjem, and invited far and wide all man- 
ner of important persons out of the district as guests there. 
Banquet hardly done, Tryggveson gave some slight signal, 
upon which armed men strode in, seized eleven of these 
principal persons, and the king said: "Since he himself 
was to become a heathen again and do sacrifice, it was his 
purpose to do it in the highest form, namely, that of human 
sacrifice, and this time not of slaves and malefactors, but of 
the best men in the country ! " In which stringent circum- 
stances the eleven seized persons and company at large gave 
unanimous consent to baptism, straightway received the 
same, and abjured their idols, but were not permitted to go 
home till they had left, in sons, brothers, and other precious 
relatives, sufficient hostages in the king's hands. 

By unwearied industry of this and better kinds, Trygg- 
veson had trampled down idolatry so far as form went — 
how far in substance may be greatly doubted. But it is to 
be remembered withal that always on the back of these 
compulsory adventures there followed English bishops, 
priests, and preachers, whereby to the open-minded convic- 
tion, to all degrees of it, was attainable, while silence and 
passivity became the duty or necessity of the unconvinced 
party. In about two years Norway was all gone over with 
a rough harrow of conversion. Heathenism, at least, con- 
strained to be silent and outwardly conformable. 



OLAF TRYGOVESON, KING OF NORWAY. II3 

Olaf Tryggveson, though his kingdom was the smallest 
of the Norse three, had risen to a renown over all the Norse 
world, which neither he of Denmark nor he of Sweden could 
pretend to rival. A magnificent, far-shining man, more 
expert in all " bodily exercises," as the Norse called them, 
than any man had ever been before him or after was. Could 
keep five daggers in the air, always catching the proper 
fifth by its handle, and sending it aloft again ; could shoot 
supremely, throw a javelin with either hand ; and, in fact, 
in battle usually threw two together. These, with swim- 
ming, climbing, leaping, were the then admirable fine arts 
of the North, in all which Tryggveson appears to have been 
the Raphael and the Michael Angelo at once. Essentially 
definable, too, if we look well into him, as a wild bit of real 
heroism in such rude guise and environment — a high, true, 
and great human soul. A Jovial burst of laughter in him 
withal ; a bright, airy, wise way of speech ; dressed beauti- 
fully and with care ; a man admired and loved exceedingly 
by those he liked ; dreaded as death by those he did not 
like. " Hardly any king," says Snorro, " was ever so well 
obeyed ; by one class out of zeal and love, by the rest out 
of dread." His glorious course, however, was not to last 
long. 

Tryggveson had already ships and navies that were the 
wonder of the North. Especially in building war-ships — 
the Crane, the Serpent, last of all, the Long Serpent — he 
had, for size, for outward beauty, and inward perfection of 
equipment, transcended all example. 

A new sea expedition undertak.en by Olaf became an ob- 
ject of attention to all neighbors ; especially Queen Sigrid 
the Proud and Svein Double-Beard,* her now king, were 
attentive to it. 

* The sister of Svein had fled to Olaf s court for protection against 
a detested marriage, whereon Olaf had become enamored of and mar- 
ried the fair fugitive. As Queen Sigrid had formerly been jilted by 
Olaf his marriage had been a sore blow to her. — G. T. F. 



114: GREAT LEADERS. 

" This insolent Tryggveson," Queen Sigrid would often 
say, and had long been saying, to her Svein, " to marry thy 
sister without leave had or asked of thee ; and now flaunting 
forth his war navies as if he, king only of paltry Norway, 
were the big hero of the North ! AVhy do you suffer it, you 
kings really great ? "" 

By such persuasions and reiterations King Svein of 
Denmark, King Olaf of Sweden, and Jarl Eric, now a 
great man there, grown rich by prosperous sea -robbery 
and other good management, were brought to take the 
matter up, and combine strenuously for destruction of 
King Olaf Tryggveson on this grand Wendland expedi- 
tion of his. 

King Olaf Tryggveson, unacquainted with all this, sailed 
away in summer with his splendid fleet, went through the 
belts with prosperous winds, under bright skies, to the ad- 
miration of both shores. Such a fleet, with its shining Ser- 
pents, long and short, and perfection of equipment and 
appearance, the Baltic never saw before. 

Olaf's chief captains, seeing the enemy's fleet come out 
and how the matter lay, strongly advised King Olaf to elude 
this stroke of treachery, and with all sail hold on his course, 
fight being now on so unequal terms. Snorro says the king, 
high on the quarter-deck where he stood, replied : " Strike 
the sails ! never shall men of mine think of flight. I never 
fled from battle Let God dispose of my life ; but flight I 
will never take ! " And so the battle arrangements immedi- 
ately began, and the battle with all fury went loose, and 
lasted hour aftei hour till almost sunset, if I well recollect 
"Olaf stood on the Serpent's quarter-deck," says Snorro, 
" high over the others. He had a gilt shield and a helmet 
inlaid with gold ; over his armor he had a short red coat, 
and was easily distinguished from other men." 

The Danish fleet, the Swedish fleet, were both of them 
quickly dealt with, and successively withdrew out of shot- 
range. And then Jarl Eric came up and fiercely grappled 



OLAF TRYGGVESON, KING OF NORWAY. II5 

witli the Long Serpent, or rather with her surrounding 
comrades, and gradually, as they were beaten empty of men, 
with the Long Serpent herself. The fight grew ever fiercer, 
more furious. Eric was supplied with new men from the 
Swedes and Danes ; Olaf had no such resource, except from 
the crews of his own beaten ships ; and at length this also 
failed him, all his ships, except the Long Serpent, being 
beaten and emptied. Olaf fought on unyielding. Eric 
twice boarded him, was twice repulsed. Olaf kept his 
quarter-deck, unconquerable, though left now more and 
more hopeless, fatally short of help. A tall young man, 
called Einar Tamberskelver, very celebrated and important 
afterward in Norway, and already the best archer known, 
kept busy with his bow. Twice he nearly shot Jarl Eric 
in his ship. " Shoot me that man ! " said Jarl Eric to a 
bowman near him ; and, just as Tamberskelver was drawing 
his bow the third time, an arrow hit it in the middle and 
broke it in two. "What is this that has broken?" asked 
King Olaf. "Norway from thy hand, king," answered 
Tamberskelver. Tryggveson's men, he observed with sur- 
prise, were striking violently on Eric's, but to no purpose ; 
nobody fell. " How is this ? " asked Tryggveson. " Our 
swords are notched and blunted, king ; they do not cut." 
Olaf stepped down to his arm-chest, delivered out new 
swords, and it was observed, as he did it, blood ran trickling 
from his wrist, but none knew where the wound was. Eric 
boarded a third time. Olaf, left with hardly more than one 
man, sprang overboard (one sees that red coat of his still 
glancing in the evening sun), and sank in the deep waters 
to his long rest. 

Rumor ran among his people that he still was not dead ; 
grounding on some movement by the ships of that traitorous 
Sigwald, they fancied Olaf had dived beneath the keels of 
his enemies, and got away with Sigwald, as Sigwald himself 
evidently did. " Much was hoped, supposed, spoken," says 
one old mourning Skald ; " but the truth was, Olaf Trygg- 



116 GREAT LEADERS. 

veson was never seen in Norseland more." Strangely he 
remains still a shining figure to us — the wildly beautifulest 
man in body and in soul that one has ever heard of in 
the North. 



CNUT OR CANUTE OF ENGLAND, ALSO 
KING OF DENMARK. 

By JOHN EICHAED GEEEN. 

[Date of birth uncertain, died 1035 or 1036. He succeeded to the 
command of the Danish invaders of England on the death of his father 
Svein, and on the death of Eadmund Ironsides, the Saxon king, he be- 
came the acknowledged King of England in 1017. His exercise of 
power was marked by great qualities of justice, ability, and devotion 
to the interests of his acquired kingdom ; and his name has been trans- 
mitted in history as a worthy successor of the Great Alfred.] 

The first of our foreign masters was the Dane. The 
countries of Scandinavia which had so long been the mere 
starting points of the pirate bands who had ravaged Eng- 
land and Ireland had now settled down into comjDarative 
order. It was the aim of Svein to unite them in a great 
Scandinavian Empire, of which England should be the 
head ; and this project, interrupted for a time by his death, 
was resumed with yet greater vigor by his son Cnut. Fear 
of the Dane was still great in the land, and Cnut had no 
sooner appeared off the English coast than Wessex, Mercia, 
and Northumberland Joined in owning him for their lord, 
and in discarding again the rule of ^thelred, who had re- 
turned on the death of Svein. When ^thelred's death in 
1016 raised his son Eadmund Ironside to the throne, the 
loyalty of London enabled him to struggle bravely for a few 
months against the Danes ; but a decisive victory at Assan- 
dun and the death of his rival left Cnut master of the realm. 
Conqueror as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the 



CNUT OF ENGLAND, ALSO KING OF DENMARK. II7 

sense that the Norman was a foreigner after him. His lan- 
guage differed little from the English tongue. He brought 
in no new system of tenure or government. Cnut ruled, in 
fact, not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. The 
good- will and tranquillity of England were necessary for the 
success of his larger schemes in the north, where the arms 
of his English subjects aided him in later years in uniting 
Denmark and Norway beneath his sway. 

Dismissing, therefore, his Danish " host," 'and retaining 
only a trained body of household troops or hus-carls to serve 
in sudden emergencies, Cnut boldly relied for support within 
his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. 
His aim during twenty years seems to have been to obliterate 
from men's minds the foreign character of his rule, and the 
bloodshed in which it had begun. The change in himself 
was as startling as the change in his policy. When he first 
appears in England, it is as the mere northman, passionate, 
revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst 
for blood. His first acts of government were a series of 
murders. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given him the 
crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the king's signal ; a 
murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund Ironside, 
while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into 
Hungary by his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as 
this Cnut rose suddenly into a wise and temperate king. 
Stranger as he was, he fell back on " Eadgar's law," on the 
old constitution of the realm, and owned no difference be- 
tween conqueror and conquered, between Dane and English- 
man. By the creation of four earldoms — those of Mercia, 
Northumberland, Wessex, and East Anglia — he recognized 
provincial independence, but he drew closer than of old the 
ties which bound the rulers of these great dependencies to 
the Crown. He even identified himself with the patriotism 
which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been 
the center of national resistance to the Dane, but Cnut 
sought above all its friendship. He paid homage to the 



118 GREAT LEADERS. 

cause for which ^Ifheah had died, by his translation of the 
archbishop's body to Canterbury. He atoned for his father's 
ravages by costly gifts to the religious houses. He protected 
English pilgrims against the robber-lords of the Alps. His 
love for monks broke out in the song which he composed as 
he listened to their chant at Ely : " Merrily sang the monks 
in Ely when Onut King rowed by " across the vast fen- waters 
that surrounded their abbey. " Row, boatmen, near the 
land, and hear we these monks sing." 

Cnut's letter from Eome to his English subjects marks 
the grandeur of his character and the noble conception he 
had formed of kingship. " I have vowed to God to lead a 
right life in all things," wrote the king, " to rule justly and 
piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judg- 
ment to all. If heretofore I have done aught beyond what 
was just, through headiness or negligence of youth, I am 
ready with God s help to amend it utterly." No royal offi- 
cer, either for fear of the king or for favor of any, is to con- 
sent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor " as 
they would value my friendship and their own well-being." 
He especially denounces unfair exactions : " I have no need 
that money be heaped together for me by unjust demands." 
" I have sent this letter before me," Cnut ends, " that all the 
people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing ; for, as 
you yourselves know, never have I spared nor will I spare to 
spend myself and my toil in what is needful and good for 
my people." 

Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. 
With him began the long internal tranquillity which was 
from this time to be the si^ecial note of our national history. 
During two hundred years, with the one terrible interval of 
the Norman Conquest, and the disturbance under Stephen, 
England alone among the kingdoms of Europe enjoyed un- 
broken repose. The wars of her kings lay far from her 
shores, in France or Normandy, or, as with Cnut, in the 
more distant lands of the north. The stern justice of their 



CNUT OF ENGLAND, ALSO KING OF DENMARK. Hg 

government secured order within. The absence of internal 
discontent under Cnut — perhaps, too, the exhaustion of the 
kingdom after the terrible Danish inroads — is proved by its 
quiet during his periods of absence. Everything witnesses 
to the growing wealth and prosperity of the country. A 
great part of English soil was, indeed, still utterly unculti- 
vated. 

Wide reaches of land were covered with wood, thicket 
and scrub, or consisted of heaths and moor. In both the 
east and the west there were vast tracts of marsh land ; 
fens nearly one hundred miles long severed East Anglia 
from the midland counties ; sites like that of Glastonbury 
or Athelney were almost inaccessible. The beaver still 
haunted marshy hollows such as those which lay about Bev- 
erley, the London craftsmen chased the wild boar and the 
wild ox in the woods of Hampstead, while wolves prowled 
round the homesteads of the north. But peace, and the 
industry it encouraged, were telling on this waste ; stag and 
wolf were retreating before the face of man, the farmer's 
axe was ringing in the forest, and villages were springing up 
in the clearings. The growth of commerce was seen in the 
rich trading-ports of the eastern coast. The main trade lay 
probably in skins and ropes and ship-masts ; and, above all, 
in the iron and steel that the Scandinavian lands so long 
supplied to Britain. But Dane and Norwegian were traders 
over a yet wider field than the northern seas ; their barks 
entered the Mediterranean, while the overland route through 
Eussia brought the wares of Constantinople and the East. 
" What do you bring to us ? " the merchant is asked in an 
old English dialogue. " I bring skins^ silks, costly gems, 
and gold," he answers, " besides various garments, pigment, 
wine, oil, and ivory, with brass and copper and tin, silver 
and gold, and such like." Men from the Ehineland and 
from Normandy, too, moored their vessels along the Thames, 
on whose rude w^harves were piled a strange medley of goods — 
pepper and spices from the far East, crates of gloves and 



120 GREAT LEADERS. 

gray cloths (it may be from the Lombard looms), sacks of 
wool, iron- work from Liege, butts of French wine and vine- 
gar, and with them the rural products of the country itself 
— cheese, butter, lard, and eggs, with live swine and fowls. 

Cnut's one aim was to win the love of his people, and all 
tradition shows how wonderful was his success. But the 
greatness of his rule hung solely on the greatness of his 
temper, and at his death the empire he had built up at once 
fell to pieces. 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROE. 

By JOHN EICHAED GEEEN. 

[The illegitimate son of Kobert, surnamed Le Diable, duke of Nor- 
mandy, and his father's successor, born 1037 ; died, 1087. Claiming 
right of inheritance under a pretended bequest of Edward the Con- 
fessor, the Saxon king of England, he levied a great army of advent- 
urers from all Europe, and in the great battle of Senlac, or, as it is 
sometimes known, Hastings, he defeated the Saxons and their King 
Harold, who had been elected by the voice of the Wittenegamotte, or 
Great Council of England, on October 14, 1066. Harold was slain, 
and the Norman conqueror was crowned. William's transcendent 
abilities as a ruler, though stained by cruelty and rapacity, made his 
reign the greatest epoch in early English history.] 

William the Great, as men of his own day styled 
him, William the Conqueror, as by one event he stamped 
himself on our history, was now Duke of Normandy. The 
full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and patient 
statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of 
the petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly dis- 
closed. But there never was a moment from his boyhood 
when he was not among the greatest of men. His life was 
one long mastering of difficulty after difficulty. The shame 
of his birth remained in his name of " the Bastard." His 
father, Duke Robert, had seen Arlotta, the daughter of a 
tanner of the town, washing her linen in the little brook by 




WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 121 

Falaise, and, loving her, had made her the mother of his 
boy. Kobert's departure on a pilgrimage from which he 
never returned left William a child-ruler among the most 
turbulent baronage in Christendom, and treason and anarchy 
surrounded him as he grew to manhood. Disorder broke 
at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat at 
Valognes by the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, 
in which the pirate temper and lawlessness lingered longest, 
William had only time to dash through the fords of Vire 
with the rebels on his track. A fierce combat of horse on 
the slopes of Val-es-dunes, to the southeastward of Caen, 
left him master of the duchy, and the old Scandinavian Nor- 
mandy yielded forever to the new civilization which streamed 
in with French alliances and the French tongue. William 
was himself a type of the transition. In the young duke's 
character the old world mingled strangely with the new, 
the pirate jostled roughly with the statesman. William was 
the most terrible, as he was the last outcome of the northern 
race. 

The very spirit of the " sea-wolves " who had so long 
" lived on the pillage of the world " seemed embodied in his 
gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage counte- 
nance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruth- 
lessness of his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his 
enemies confessed, " was William's peer." Boy as he was, 
horse and man went down before his lance at Val-es-dunes. 
All the fierce gayety of his nature broke out in the chival- 
rous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins 
with but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over 
the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him — a ride 
with hawk on fist as though war and the chase were one. 
No man could bend his bow. His mace crashed its way 
through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the stand- 
ard. He rose to his greatest heights in moments when other 
men despaired. His voice rang out like a trumpet to rally 
his soldiers as they fled before the English charge at Senlac. 
6 



122 GREAT LEADERS, 

In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head 
of his fainting troops, and helped with his own hands to 
clear a road through the snowdrifts. With the northman's 
daring broke out the northman's pitilessness. When the 
townsmen of Alen9on hung raw hides along their walls in 
scorn of the baseness of his birth, with cries of " Work for 
the tanner ! " William tore out his prisoners' eyes, cut off 
their hands and feet, and flung them into the town. 

At the close of his greatest victory he refused Harold's 
body a grave. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven 
from their homes to make him a hunting-ground, and his 
harrying of Northumbria left the north of England a desolate 
waste. There is a grim, ruthless ring about his very jests. 
In his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror's 
unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which confined him to 
his bed at Eouen. " King William has as long a lying-in," 
laughed his enemy, " as a woman behind her curtains ! " 
" When I get up," swore William, " I will go to mass in 
Philip's land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. 
I will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands 
shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make." 
At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along 
the French border fulfilled the Conqueror's vow. There is 
the same savage temper in the loneliness of his life. He 
recked little of men's love or hate. His grim look, his 
pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread terror 
through his court. " So stark and fierce was he," says the 
English chronicler, " that none dared resist his will." His 
graciousness to Anselm only brought out into stronger relief 
the general harshness of his tone. His very wrath was soli- 
tary. " To no man spake he, and no man dared speak to 
him," when the news reached him of Harold's accession to 
the throne. It was only when he passed from the palace 
to the loneliness of the woods that the king's temper unbent. 
" He loved the wild deer as though he had been their father. 
Whosoever should slay hart or hind man should blind him." 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 123 

Death itself took its color from the savage solitude of his 
life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath left him, and 
the Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor. 

It is not to his victory at Senlac, but to the struggle 
which followed his return from Normandy, that William 
owes his title of the " Conqueror." The struggle which 
ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed William's 
position. He no longer held the land merely as elected 
king ; he added to his elective right the right of conquest. 
The system of government which he originated was, in 
fact, the result of the double character of his power. It 
represented neither the purely feudal system of the Conti- 
nent nor the system of the older English royalty. More 
truly, perhaps, it may be said to have represented both. As 
the successor of Eadward, William retained the judicial and 
administrative organization of the older English realm. As 
the conqueror of England he introduced the military organ- 
ization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the secure 
possession of his conquests. The ground was already pre- 
pared for such an organization ; we have seen the begin- 
nings of English feudalism in the warriors, the " compan- 
ions," or "thegns," who were personally attached to the 
king's war-band, and received estates from the folk-land in 
reward for their personal services. In later times this feudal 
distribution of estates had greatly increased, as the bulk of 
the nobles followed the king's example and bound their 
tenants to themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation. 
On the other hand, the pure freeholders, the class which 
formed the basis of the original English society, had been 
gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of 
the class above them, but still more through the incessant 
wars and invasions which drove them to seek protectors 
among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Feud- 
alism, in fact, was superseding the older freedom in England 
even before the reign of William, as it had already super- 
seded it in Germany or France. But the tendency was 



124r GREAT LEADERS. 

quickened and intensified by the Conquest ; the desperate 
and universal resistance of his English subjects forced Will- 
iam to hold by the sword what the sword had won, and an 
army strong enough to crush at any moment a national re- 
volt was necessary for the preservation of his throne. Such 
an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of 
the soil. The failure of the English risings cleared the way 
for its establishment ; the greater part of the higher nobility 
fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood 
either forfeited the whole of their lands or redeemed a por- 
tion of them by the surrender of the rest. 

The dependence of the Church on the royal power was 
strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from 
baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated without 
the king's leave. No synod could legislate without his pre- 
vious assent and subsequent confirmation of its decrees. No 
papal letters could be received within the realm save by his 
permission. William firmly repudiated the claims which 
were now beginning to be put forward by the court of Eome. 
When Gregory VII called on him to do fealty for his realm, 
the king sternly refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I 
have never willed to do, nor do I will to do it now. I have 
never promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it 
to yours." 

The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between 
the baronage and the crown began. The wisdom of Will- 
iam's policy in the destruction of the great earldoms which 
had overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at 
their restoration made by Eoger, the son of his minister, 
William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton Ealf de Guader, 
whom the king had rewarded for his services at Senlac with 
the earldom of Norfolk. The rising was quickly suppressed, 
Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven over sea ; but 
the intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in 
William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pre- 
tense of aspiring by arms to the papacy, Bishop Odo col- 



WILLIAM TEE CONQUEROR, 125 

lected money and men; but the treasure was at once 
seized by the royal officers, and the bishop arrested in the 
midst of the court. Even at the king's bidding no officer 
would venture to seize on a prelate of the Church ; it was 
with his own hands that William was forced to effect his 
arrest. " I arrest not the bishop, but the Earl of Kent," 
laughed the Conqueror, and Odo remained a prisoner till 
William's death. 

It was, in fact, this vigorous personality of William which 
proved the chief safeguard of his throne. " Stark he was," 
says the English chronicler, " to men that withstood him. 
Earls that did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds ; 
bishops he stripped of their bishoprics, abbots of their abba- 
cies. He spared not his own brother ; first he was in the 
land, but the king cast him into bondage. If a man would 
live and hold his lands, need it were that he should follow 
the king's will." But, stern as his rule was, it gave peace to 
the land. Even amid the sufferings which necessarily sprang 
from the circumstances of the Conquest itself, from the erec- 
tion of castles, or the inclosure of forests, or the exactions 
which built up the great hoard at Winchester, Englishmen 
were unable to forget " the good peace he made in the land, 
so that a man might fare over his realm with a bosom full of 
gold." Strange touches of a humanity far in advance of his 
age contrasted with the general temper of his government. 
One of the strongest traits in his character was his aversion 
to shed blood by process of law ; he formally abolished the 
punishment of death, and only a single execution stains the 
annals of his reign. An edict yet more honorable to him 
put an end to the slave-trade which had till then been car- 
ried on at the port of Bristol. The pitiless warrior, the stern 
and awful king was a tender and faithful husband, an affec- 
tionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke into 
gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. 
If William was " stark " to rebel and baron, men noted that 
he was " mild to those that loved God." 



126 GREAT LEADERS. 

EGBERT GUISCARD. 

By EDWARD GIBBON. 

[Bom about 1015, died 1085. This Norman adventurer, the sixth 
son of a small baron, became Duke of Apulia and Calabria in Italy by- 
conquest, and founded the Kingdom of Naples, which existed till 1860. 
Equally distinguished by personal prowess, generalship, and diplomatic 
astuteness, he filled a large figure in the affairs of his time, and was 
one of the stoutest bulwarks against Saracenic aggression.] 

The pedigree of Eobert Guiscard is variously deduced 
from the peasants and the dukes of Normandy — from the 
peasants, by the pride and ignorance of a Grecian princess ; 
from the dukes, by the ignorance and flattery of the Italian 
subjects. His genuine descent may be ascribed to the sec- 
ond or middle order of private nobility. He sprang from a 
race of valvassors or Mnnerets^ of the diocese of Coutances, 
in the lower Normandy ; the castle of Hauteville was their 
honorable seat, his father Tancred was conspicuous in the 
court and army of the duke, and his military service was 
furnished by ten soldiers or knights. Two marriages, of a 
rank not unworthy of his own, made him the father of twelve 
sons, who were educated at home by the impartial tender- 
ness of his second wife. But a narrow patrimony was in- 
sufficient for this numerous and daring progeny ; they saw 
around the neighborhood the mischiefs of poverty and dis- 
cord, and resolved to seek in foreign wars a more glorious 
inheritance. Two only remained to perpetuate the race 
and cherish their father's age ; their ten brothers, as they 
successively attained the vigor of manhood, departed from 
the castle, passed the Alps, and joined the Apulian camp of 
the Normans.. 

The elder were prompted by native spirit ; their success 
encouraged their younger brethren, and the three first in 
seniority — William, Drogo, and Humphrey — deserved to be 



ROBERT GUISCARD. 127 

the chiefs of their nation and the founders of the new re- 
public. Robert was the eldest of the seven sons of the sec- 
ond marriage, and even the reluctant praise of his foes has 
endowed him with the heroic qualities of a soldier and a 
statesman. His lofty stature surpassed the tallest of his 
army ; his limbs were cast in the true proportion of strength 
and gracefulness, and to the decline of life he maintained 
the patient vigor of health and the commanding dignity of 
his form. His complexion was ruddy, his shoulders were 
broad, his hair and beard were long and of a flaxen color, his 
eyes sparkled with fire, and his voice, like that of Achilles, 
could impress obedience and terror amid the tumult of 
battle. In the ruder ages of chivalry such qualifications are 
not below the notice of the poet or historian. They may 
observe that Robert at once, and with equal dexterity, could 
wield in the right hand his sword, his lance in the left ; that 
in the battle of Civitella he was thrice unhorsed, and that 
in the close of that memorable day he was adjudged to have 
borne away the prize of valor from the warriors of the two 
armies. His boundless ambition was founded on the con- 
sciousness of superior worth ; in the pursuit of greatness he 
was never arrested by the scruples of justice, and seldom 
moved by the feelings of humanity. Though not insensible 
of fame, the choice of open or clandestine means was deter- 
mined only by his present advantage. The surname of 
Guiscard * was applied to this master of political wisdom, 
which is too often confounded with the practice of dissimu- 
lation and deceit ; and Robert is praised by the Apulian poet 
for excelling the cunning of Ulysses and the eloquence of 
Cicero. Yet these arts wxre disguised by an appearance of 
military frankness ; in his highest fortune he was accessible 
and courteous to his fellow-soldiers, and, while he indulged 
the prejudices of his new subjects, he affected in his dress 
and manners to maintain the ancient fashion of his country. 

* Derived from an old Italian word meaning astuteness or shrewd- 
ness.— G. T. F. 



128 GREAT LEADERS. 

He grasped with a rapacious, that he might distribute 
with a liberal hand ; his primitive indigence had taught the 
habits of frugality ; the gain of a merchant was not below 
his attention, and his prisoners were tortured with slow and 
unfeeling cruelty to force a discovery of their secret treas- 
ure. According to the Greeks, he departed from Normandy 
with only five followers on horseback and thirty on foot ; 
yet even this allowance appears too bountiful. The sixth 
son of Tancred of Hauteville passed the Alps as a pilgrim, 
and his first military band was levied among the adventur- 
ers of Italy. His brothers and countrymen had divided the 
fertile lands of Apulia, but they guarded their shares with 
the jealousy of avarice ; the aspiring youth was driven for- 
ward to the mountains of Calabria, and in his first exploits 
against the Greeks and the natives it is not easy to discrimi- 
nate the hero from the robber. To surprise a castle or a 
convent, to ensnare a wealthy citizen, to plunder the adja- 
cent villages for necessary food, were the obscure labors 
which formed and exercised the powers of his mind and 
body. The volunteers of Normandy adhered to his stand- 
ard ; and, under his command, the peasants of Calabria as- 
sumed the name and character of Normans. 

As the genius of Robert expanded with his fortune, he 
awakened the jealousy of his elder brother, by whom, in a 
transient quarrel, his life was threatened and his liberty 
restrained. After the death of Humphrey the tender age 
of his sons excluded them from the command ; they were 
reduced to a private estate by the ambition of their guardian 
and uncle, and Guiscard was exalted on a buckler and sa- 
luted Count of Apulia and general of the republic. With 
an increase of authority and of force he resumed the con- 
quest of Calabria, and soon aspired to a rank that should 
raise him forever above the heads of his equals. By some 
acts of rapine or sacrilege he had incurred a papal excom- 
munication, but Nicholas II was easily persuaded that the 
divisions of friends could terminate only in their mutual 



ROBERT GUISCARD. 129 

prejudice; that the Normans were the faithful champions 
of the Holy See, and it was safer to trust the alliance of a 
prince than the caprice of an aristocracy. A synod of one 
hundred bishops was convened at Melphi, and the count in- 
terrupted an important enterprise to guard the person and 
execute the decrees of the Roman pontiff. His gratitude 
and policy conferred on Robert and his posterity the ducal 
title, with the investiture of Apulia, Calabria, and all the 
lands, both in Italy and Sicily, which his sword could rescue 
from the schismatic Greeks and the unbelieving Saracens. 
This apostolic sanction might Justify his arms, but the obe- 
dience of a free and victorious people could not be trans- 
ferred without their consent, and Guiscard dissembled his 
elevation till the ensuing campaign had been illustrated by 
the conquest of Consenza and Reggio. In the hour of tri- 
umph he assembled his troops, and solicited the Normans to 
confirm by their suffrage the judgment of the vicar of 
Christ; the soldiers hailed with joyful acclamations their 
valiant duke, and the counts, his former equals, pronounced 
the oath of fidelity with hollow smiles and secret indignation. 
After this inauguration Robert styled himself, " by the 
grace of God and St. Peter, Duke of Apulia, Calabria, 
and hereafter of Sicily"; and it was the labor of twenty 
years to deserve and realize these lofty appellations. Such, 
tardy progress in a narrow space may seem unworthy of the 
abilities of the chief and the spirit of the nation, but the 
Normans were few in number, their resources were scanty, 
their service was voluntary and precarious. The bravest 
designs of the duke were sometimes opposed by the free 
voice of his parliament of barons ; the twelve counts of pop- 
ular election conspired against his authority, and against 
their perfidious uncle the sons of Humphrey demanded jus- 
tice and revenge. By his policy and vigor Guiscard dis- 
covered their plots, suppressed their rebellions, and punished 
the guilty with death or exile ; but in these domestic feuds 
his years and the national strength were unprofitably con- 



laa GREAT LEADERS. 

sumed. After the defeat of his foreign enemies — the 
Greeks, Lombards, and Saracens — their broken forces re- 
treated to the strong and populous cities of the sea-coast. 
They excelled in the arts of fortification and defense ; the 
Normans were accustomed to serve on horseback in the 
field, and their rude attempts could only succeed by the 
efforts of persevering courage. The resistance of Salerno 
was maintained above eight months ; the siege or blockade of 
Bari lasted nearly four years. ,In these actions the Norman 
duke was the foremost in every danger ; in every fatigue the 
last and most patient. As he pressed the citadel of Salerno 
a huge stone from the rampart shattered one of his mili- 
tary engines, and by a splinter he was wounded in the breast. 
Before the gates of Bari he lodged in a miserable hut or 
barrack, composed of dry branches, and thatched with straw 
— a perilous station, on all sides open to the inclemency of 
the winter and the spears of the enemy. 

The Italian conquests of Eobert correspond with the 
limits of the present kingdom of Naples, and the countries 
united by his arms have not been dissevered by the revolu- 
tions of seven hundred years. 



THOMAS A BECKET, AECHBISHOP OF 
CANTEEBURY. 

Br DAVID HUME. 

[Born in 1119, died by assassination in the Cathedral Church of 
Canterbury in 1170. For a long time the Chancellor of England and 
favorite adviser of the king, Henry II, he became on his installation 
as archbishop the resolute advocate of papal aggression against tlio 
rights and claims of the English kings to the supreme control of na- 
tional affairs.] 

Thomas a Becket, the first man of English descent 
who, since the Norman conquest, had, during the course of 



ARCHBISHOP THOMAS A BECKET. \2>\ 

a whole century, risen to any considerable station, was born 
of reputable parents in the city of London ; and being en- 
dowed both with industry and capacity, he early insinuated 
himself into the favor of Archbishop Theobald, and ob- 
tained from that prelate some preferments and offices. By 
their means he was enabled to travel for improvement to 
Italy, where he studied the civil and canon law at Bologna ; 
and on his return, he appeared to have made such profi- 
ciency in knowledge that he was promoted by his patron to 
the Archdeaconry of Canterbury, an office of considerable 
trust and profit. He was afterward employed with success 
by Theobald in transacting business at Rome; and, on 
Henry's accession, he was recommended to that monarch 
as worthy of further preferment. Henry, who knew that 
Becket had been instrumental in supporting that resolution 
of the archbishop which had tended so much to facilitate 
his own advancement to the throne, was already prepos- 
sessed in his favor ; and finding, on further acquaintance, 
that his spirit and abilities entitled him to any trust, he 
soon promoted him to the dignity of chancellor, one of the 
first civil offices in the kingdom. The chancellor, in that 
age, beside the custody of the great seal, had possession of 
all vacant prelacies and abbeys ; he was the guardian of all 
such minors and pupils as were the king's tenants ; all bar- 
onies which escheated to the crown were under his adminis- 
tration ; he was entitled to a place in council, even though 
he were not particularly summoned ; and as he exercised 
also the office of secretary of state, and it belonged to him 
to countersign all commissions, writs, and letters patent, he 
was a kind of prime minister, and was concerned in the dis- 
patch of every business of importance. Besides exercising 
this high office, Becket, by the favor of the king or arch- 
bishop, was made Provost of Beverley, Dean of Hastings, 
and Constable of the Tower ; he was put in possession of 
the honors of Eye and Berkham, large baronies that had 
escheated to the crown ; and, to complete his grandeur, he 



132 GREAT LEADERS. 

was intrusted with the education of Prince Henry, the king's 
eldest son and heir of the monarchy. 

The pomp of his retinue, the sumptuousness of his furni- 
ture, the luxury of his table, the munificence of his presents, 
corresponded to these great preferments ; or rather exceeded 
anything that England had ever before seen in any subject. 
His historian and secretary, Fitz- Stephens, mentions, among 
other particulars, that his apartments were every day in 
winter covered with clean straw or hay, and in summer with 
green rushes or boughs, lest the gentlemen who paid court 
to him, and who could not, by reason of their great number, 
find a place at table, should soil their fine clothes by sitting 
on a dirty floor. A great number of knights were retained 
in his service ; the greatest barons were proud of being re- 
ceived at his table ; his house was a place of education for 
the sons of the chief nobility ; and the king himself fre- 
quently vouchsafed to partake of his entertainments. As 
his way of life was splendid and opulent, his amusements 
and occupations were gay, and partook of the cavalier spirit, 
which, as he had only taken deacon's orders, he did not 
think unbefitting his character. He employed himself at 
leisure hours in hunting, hawking, gaming, and horseman- 
ship ; he exposed his person in several military actions ; he 
carried over, at his own charge, seven hundred knights to 
attend the king in his wars at Toulouse ; in the subsequent 
wars on the frontiers of Normandy he maintained, during 
forty days, twelve hundred knights, and four thousand of 
their train ; and in an embassy to France with which he was 
intrusted he astonished that court with the number and 
magnificence of his retinue. 

Becket, who, by his complaisance and good humor, had 
rendered himself agreeable, and by his industry and abili- 
ties useful, to his master, appeared to him the fittest person 
for supplying the vacancy made by the death of Theobald. 
As he was well acquainted w^ith the king's intentions of re- 
trenching, or rather confining within the ancient bounds, 



ARCHBISHOP THOMAS A BECKET. 133 

all ecclesiastical privileges, and always showed a ready dis- 
position to comply with them, Henry, who never expected 
any resistance from that quarter, immediately issued orders 
for electing him Archbishop of Canterbury. But this reso- 
lution, which was taken contrary to the opinion of Matilda 
and many of the ministers, drew after it very unhappy con- 
sequences; and never prince of so great penetration ap- 
peared, in the issue, to have so little understood the genius 
and character of his minister. 

No sooner was Becket installed in this high dignity, 
which rendered him for life the second person in the king- 
dom, with some pretentions of aspiring to be the first, than 
he totally altered his demeanor and conduct, and endeavored 
to acquire the character of sanctity, of which his former 
busy and ostentatious course of life might, in the eyes of 
the people, have naturally bereaved him. Without consult- 
ing the king, he immediately returned into his hands the 
commission of chancellor, pretending that he must thence- 
forth detach himself from secular affairs and be solely em- 
ployed in the exercise of his spiritual function, but in real- 
ity, that he might break off all connections with Henry, and 
apprise him that Becket, as Primate of England, was now 
become entirely a new personage. He maintained in his 
retinue and attendants alone his ancient pomp and luster, 
which was useful to strike the vulgar ; in his own person he 
affected the greatest austerity and most rigid mortification, 
which, he was sensible, would have an equal or a greater 
tendency to the same end. He wore sackcloth next his 
skin, which, by his affected care to conceal it, was necessa- 
rily the more remarked by all the world ; he changed it so 
seldom, that it was filled with dirt and vermin ; his usual 
diet was bread, his drink water, which he even rendered 
further unpalatable by the mixture of unsavory herbs ; he 
tore his back with the frequent discipline which he inflicted 
on it ; he daily on his knees washed, in imitation of Christ, 
the feet of thirteen beggars, whom he afterward dismissed 



134 GREAT LEADERS. 

with presents ; he gained the affection of the monks by his 
frequent charities to the convents and hospitals ; every one 
who made profession of sanctity was admitted to his conver- 
sation, and returned full of panegyrics on the humility as 
well as on the piety and mortification of the holy primate ; 
he seemed to be perpetually employed in reciting prayers 
and pious lectures, or in perusing religious discourses ; his 
aspect wore the appearance of seriousness and mental recol- 
lection and secret devotion; and all men of penetration 
plainly saw that he was meditating some great design, and 
that the ambition and ostentation of his character had turned 
itself toward a new and more dangerous object. 

Four gentlemen of the king's household, Eeginald Fitz- 
Urse, William de Traci, Hugh de Moreville, and Eichard 
Brito, taking certain passionate expressions to be a hint for 
Becket's death, immediately communicated their thoughts 
to each other, and, swearing to avenge their prince's quarrel, 
secretly withdrew from court. Some menacing expressions 
which they had dropped gave a suspicion of their design, 
and the king dispatched a messenger after them, charging 
them to attempt nothing against the person of the primate ; 
but these orders arrived too late to prevent their fatal pur- 
pose. The four assassins, though they took different roads 
to England, arrived nearly about the same time at Saltwoode, 
near Canterbury, and being there joined by some assistants 
they proceeded in great haste to the archiepiscopal palace. 
They found the priinate, who trusted entirely to the sacred- 
ness of his character, very slenderly attended ; and, though 
they threw out many menaces and reproaches against him, 
he was so incapable of fear that, without using any precau- 
tions against their violence, he immediately went to St. 
Benedict's Church to hear vespers. They followed him 
thither, attacked him before the altar, and having cloven 
his head with many blows retired without meeting any op- 
position. This was the tragical end of Thomas a Becket, a 
prelate of the most lofty, intrepid, and inflexible spirit, who 



SALADIN. 135 

was able to cover to the world, and probably to himself, the 
enterprises of pride and ambition under the disguise of sanc- 
tity and of zeal for the interests of religion : an extraordi- 
nary personage, surely, had he been allowed to remain in his 
first station, and had directed the vehemence of his charac- 
ter to the support of law and justice, instead of being en- 
gaged, by the prejudices of the times, to sacrifice all private 
duties and public connections to ties which he imagined or 
represented as superior to every civil and political considera- 
tion. But no man who enters into the genius of that age 
can reasonably doubt of this prelate's sincerity. 



SALADIK 

By EDWAKD gibbon. 

[Malek al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Abu Modhafer Yusuf, Sultan 
of Egypt and Syria, born 1137, died 1193. Of Kurdish descent he 
finally rose from a subordinate rank to royal power. His name stands 
embalmed in history and tradition as the most noble and chivalrous 
of those Saracen rulers whom the Christian powers fought against 
during the Crusades.] 

The hilly country beyond the Tigris is occupied by the 
pastoral tribes of the Kurds, a people hardy, strong, savage, 
impatient of the yoke, addicted to rapine, and tenacious of 
the government of their national chiefs. The resemblance 
of name, situation, and manners, seems to identify them with 
the Carduchians of the Greeks ; and they still defend against 
the Ottoman Porte the antique freedom which they assert- 
ed against the successors of Cyrus. Poverty and ambition 
prompted them to embrace the profession of mercenary sol- 
diers ; the service of his father and uncle prepared the reign 
of the great Saladin, and the son of Job or Ayub, a simple 
Kurd, magnanimously smiled at his pedigree, which flattery 
deduced from the Arabian caliphs. So unconscious was 



136 GREAT LEADERS. 

Noureddin of the impending ruin of his house that he con- 
strained the reluctant youth to follow his Uncle Shiracouh 
into Egypt ; his military character was established by the 
defense of Alexandria, and, if we may believe the Latins, he 
solicited and obtained from the Christian general the pro- 
fane honors of knighthood. On the death of Shiracouh, 
the office of grand vizier was bestowed on Saladin, as the 
youngest and least powerful of the emirs ; but with the ad- 
vice of his father, whom he invited to Cairo, his genius ob- 
tained the ascendant over his equals, and attached the army 
to his person and interest. While Noureddin lived, these 
ambitious Kurds were the most humble of his slaves ; and 
the indiscreet murmurs of the divan were silenced by the 
l^rudent Ayub, who loudly protested that at the command 
of the sultan he himself would lead his son in chains to the 
foot of the throne. " Such language," he added in private, 
"was prudent and proper in an assembly of your rivals; 
but we are now above fear and obedience, and the threats 
of Noureddin shall not extort the tribute of a sugar-cane." 
His seasonable death relieved them from the odious and 
doubtful conflict ; his son, a minor of eleven years of age, 
was left for a while to the emirs of Damascus, and the new 
lord of Egypt was decorated by the caliph with every title 
that could sanctify his usurpation in the eyes of the people. 
Nor was Saladin long content with the possession of 
Egypt ; he despoiled the Christians of Jerusalem, and the 
Atabeks of Damascus, Aleppo, and Diarbekir ; Mecca and 
Medina acknowledged him for their temporal protector ; his 
brother subdued the distant regions of Yemen, or the happy 
Arabia ; and at the hour of his death, his empire was spread 
from the African Tripoli to the Tigris, and from the Indian 
Ocean to the mountains of Armenia. In the judgment of 
his character, the reproaches of treason and ingratitude strike 
forcibly on our minds, impressed, as they are, with the prin- 
ciple and experience of law and loyalty. But his ambition 
may in some measure be excused by the revolutions of Asia, 



SALADIN, 137 

which had erased every notion of legitimate succession ; by 
the recent example of the Atabeks themselves ; by his rev- 
erence to the son of his benefactor, his humane and gener- 
ous behavior to the collateral branches ; by their incapacity 
and Ids merit ; by the approbation of the caliph, the sole 
source of all legitimate power ; and, above all, by the wishes 
and interest of the people, whose happiness is the first object 
of government. In Ms virtues, and in those of his patron, 
they admired the singular union of the hero and the saint ; 
for both Noureddin and Saladin are ranked among the Ma- 
hometan saints ; and the constant meditation of the holy 
war appears to have shed a serious and sober color over their 
lives and actions. 

The youth of the latter was addicted to wine and women, 
but his aspiring spirit soon renounced the temptations of 
pleasure for the graver follies of fame and dominion. The 
garment of Saladin was of coarse woolen, water was his only 
drink, and while he emulated the temperance, he surpassed 
the chastity of his Arabian prophet. Both in faith and 
practice he was a rigid Mussulman ; he ever deplored that 
the defense of religion had not allowed him to accomplish 
the pilgrimage of Mecca ; but at the stated hours, five times 
each day, the sultan devoutly prayed with his brethren ; the 
involuntary omission of fasting was scrupulously repaid, and 
his perusal of the Koran on horseback between the approach- 
ing armies may be quoted as a proof, however ostentatious, 
of piety and courage. The superstitious doctrine of the sect 
of Shafei was the only study that he deigned to encourage. 
The poets were safe in his contempt, but all profane science 
was the object of his aversion, and a philosopher who had 
vented some speculative novelties was seized and strangled 
by the command of the royal saint. The justice of his 
divan was accessible to the meanest suppliant against him- 
self and his ministers ; and it was only for a kingdom that 
Saladin would deviate from the rule of equity. While the 
descendants of Seljuk and Zenghi held his stirrup and 



138 GREAT LEADERS. 

smoothed liis garments, he was affable and patient with the 
meanest of his servants. So boundless was his liberality 
that he distributed twelve thousand horses at the siege of 
Acre ; and, at the time of his death, no more than forty- 
seven drachms of silver and one piece of gold coin were 
found in the treasury ; yet in a martial reign, the tributes 
were diminished, and the wealthy citizens enjoyed without 
fear or danger the fruits of their industry. Egypt, Syria, 
and Arabia, were adorned by the royal foundations of hos- 
pitals, colleges, and mosques, and Cairo was fortified with a 
wall and citadel ; but his works were consecrated to public 
use, nor did the sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace 
of private luxury. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the 
genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the 
Christians : the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friend- 
ship, the Greek emperor solicited his alliance, and the con- 
quest of Jerusalem diffused, and perhaps magnified, his fame 
both in the East and West. 



HENEY II, KING OF ENGLAND. 

By DAVID HUME. 

[Born 1113, died 1189. Henry was the grandson of Henry I, the 
great-grandson of William the Conqueror by the distaff side, and son 
of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou. He was first of the Plan- 
tagenet dynasty of English kings. His reign was brilliantly distin- 
guished by the further establishment of legal institutions and a rigid 
regard for justice to all classes of his subjects.] 

Thus died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, and thirty- 
fifth of his reign, the greatest prince of his time, for wisdom, 
virtue, and abilities, and the most powerful in extent of do- 
minion of all those that had ever filled the throne of Eng- 
land. His character, in private as well as in public life, is 
almost without a blemish, and he seems to have possessed 



HENRY II, KIN a OF ENGLAND. 139 

every accomplishment, both of body and mind, which makes 
a man either estimable or amiable. He was of a middle 
stature, strong and well proportioned ; his countenance was 
lively and engaging ; his conversation affable and entertain- 
ing ; his elocution easy, persuasive, and ever at command. 
He loved peace, but possessed both bravery and conduct in 
war, was provident without timidity, severe in the execution 
of justice without rigor, and temperate without austerity. 
He preserved health, and kept himself from corpulency, to 
which he was somewhat inclined, by an abstemious diet and 
by frequent exercise, particularly hunting. When he could 
enjoy leisure, he recreated himself either in learned conver- 
sation or in reading, and he cultivated his natural talents by 
study above any prince of his time. His affections, as well 
as his enmities, were warm and durable, and his long expe- 
rience of the ingratitude and infidelity of men never de- 
stroyed the natural sensibility of his temper, which disposed 
him to friendship and society. His character has been trans- 
mitted to us by several writers w^ho were his contemporaries, 
and it extremely resembles, in its most remarkable features, 
that of his maternal grandfather, Henry I, excepting only 
that ambition, which was a ruling passion in both, found 
not in the first Henry such unexceptionable means of exert- 
ing itself, and pushed that prince into measures which were 
both criminal in themselves and were the cause of further 
crimes, from which his grandson's conduct was happily 
exempted. 

This prince, like most of his predecessors of the Norman 
line, except Stephen, passed more of his time on the Conti- 
nent than in this island ; he was surrounded with the Eng- 
lish gentry and nobility when abroad ; the French gentry 
and nobility attended him when he resided in England; 
both nations acted in the government as if they were the 
same people ; and, on many occasions, the legislatures seem 
not to have been distinguished. As the king and all the 
English barons were of French extraction, the manners of 



140 GREAT LEADERS. 

that people acquired the ascendant, and were regarded as 
the models of imitation. All foreign improvements, there- 
fore, such as they were, in literature and politeness, in laws 
and arts, seem now to have been, in a good measure, trans- 
planted into England, and that kingdom was become little 
inferior, in all the fashionable accomplishments, to any of 
its neighbors on the Continent. The more homely but more 
sensible manners and principles of the Saxons were ex- 
changed for the affectations of chivalry and the subtleties of 
school philosophy ; the feudal ideas of civil government, the 
Romish sentiments in religion, had taken entire possession 
of the people ; by the former, the sense of submission toward 
princes was somewhat diminished in the barons; by the 
latter, the devoted attachment to papal authority was much 
augmented among the clergy. The Norman and other for- 
eign families established in England had now struck deep 
root, and being entirely incorporated with the people, whom 
at first they oppressed and despised, they no longer thought 
that they needed the protection of the crown for the enjoy- 
ment of their possessions, or considered their tenure as pre- 
carious. They aspired to the same liberty and independence 
which they saw enjoyed by their brethren on the Continent, 
and desired to restrain those exorbitant prerogatives and 
arbitrary practices which the necessities of war and the vio- 
lence of conquest had at first obliged them to indulge in 
their monarch. That memory also of a more equal govern- 
ment under the Saxon princes, which remained with the 
English, diffused still further the spirit of liberty, and made 
the barons both desirous of more independence to them- 
selves, and willing to indulge i^ to the people. And it was 
not long ere this secret revolution in the sentiments of men 
produced, first violent convulsions in the state, then an evi- 
dent alteration in the maxims of government. 

The history of all the preceding kings of England since 
the Conquest gives evident proofs of the disorders attending 
the feudal institutions — the licentiousness of the barons, 



HENRY II, KING OF ENGLAND. 141 

their spirit of rebellion against the prince and laws, and of 
animosity against each other ; the conduct of the barons in 
the transmarine dominions of those monarchs afforded, per- 
haps, still more flagrant instances of these convulsions, and 
the history of France during several ages consists almost 
entirely of narrations of this nature. The cities, during the 
continuance of this violent government, could neither be 
very numerous nor populous, and there occur instances 
which seem to evince that, though these are always the first 
seat of law and liberty, their police was in general loose and 
irregular, and exposed to the same disorders with those by 
which the country was generally infested. It was a custom 
in London for great numbers, to the amount of a hundred 
or more, the sons and relations of considerable citizens, to 
form themselves into a licentious confederacy, to break into 
rich houses and plunder them, to rob and murder the pas- 
sengers, and to commit with impunity all sorts of disorder. 
By these crimes it had become so dangerous to walk the 
streets by night that the citizens durst no more venture 
abroad after sunset than if they had been exposed to the 
incursions of a public enemy. The brother of the Earl of 
Ferrars had been murdered by some of those nocturnal riot- 
ers, and the death of so eminent a person, which was much 
more regarded than that of many thousands of an inferior 
station, so provoked the king that he swore vengeance against 
the criminals, and became thenceforth more rigorous in the 
execution of the laws. 

Henry's care in administering justice had gained him so 
great a reputation that even foreign and distant princes 
made him arbiter, and submitted their differences to his 
judgment. Sanchez, King of Navarre, having some con- 
troversies with Alphonso, King of Castile, was contented, 
though Alphonso had married the daughter of Henry, to 
choose this prince for a referee ; and they agreed, each of 
them to consign three castles into neutral hands as a pledge 
of their not departing from his award. Henry made the 



142 GREAT LEADERS. 

cause be examined before his great council, and gave a sen- 
tence which was submitted to by both parties. These two 
Spanish kings sent each a stout champion to the court of 
England, in order to defend his cause by arms in case the 
way of duel had been chosen by Henry. 



GENGHIS OK ZINGIS KHAN. 

By EDWARD GIBBON. 

[An Asiatic conqueror, born about 1160, died 1227. His conquests 
extended over the greater part of Asia, and touched Eastern Europe. 
He belonged to that type exe;nplified by Alexander the Great, Attila, 
Timour, and Napoleon, who made war for the mere passion and glory 
of conquest, although he seems to have been by no means destitute of 
generous and magnanimous qualities.] 

From the spacious highlands between China, Siberia, 
and the Caspian Sea, the tide of emigration and war has 
repeatedly been poured. These ancient seats of the Huns 
and Turks were occupied in the twelfth century by many 
pastoral tribes, of the same descent and similar manners, 
which were united and (a. d. 1206-1227) led to conquest 
by the formidable Zingis. In his ascent to greatness, that 
barbarian (whose private appellation was Temugin) had 
trampled on the necks of his equals. His birth was noble, 
but it was in the pride of victory that the prince or peo- 
ple deduced his seventh ancestor from the immaculate con- 
ception of a virgin. His father had reigned over thirteen 
hordes, which composed about thirty or forty thousand fam- 
ilies, above two thirds refused to pay tithes or obedience to 
his infant son, and at the age of thirteen, Temugin fought 
a battle against his rebellious subjects. The future con- 
queror of Asia was reduced to fly and to obey, but he rose 
superior to his fortune, and in his fortieth year he had 
established his fame and dominion over the circumjacent 



GENGHIS OR ZINGIS KHAN. 143 

tribes. In a state of society in which policy is rude and 
valor is universal the ascendant of one man must be found- 
ed on his power and resolution to punish his enemies and 
recompense his friends. His first military league was rati- 
fied by the simple rites of sacrificing a horse and tasting of 
a running stream ; Temugin pledged himself to divide with 
his followers the sweets and the bitters of life, and, when 
he had shared among them his horses and apparel, he was 
rich in their gratitude and his own hopes. After his first 
victory, he placed seventy caldrons on the fire, and seventy 
of the most guilty rebels were cast headlong into the boil- 
ing water. The sphere of his attraction was continually en- 
larged by the ruin of the proud and the submission of the 
prudent ; and the boldest chieftains might tremble when 
they beheld, enchased in silver, the skull of the khan of the 
Keraites, who, under the name of Prester John, had corre- 
sponded with the Eoman pontiff and the princes of Europe. 
The ambition of Temugin condescended to employ the arts 
of superstition, and it was from a naked prophet who could 
ascend to heaven on a white horse that he accepted the title 
of Zingis, the most greats and a divine right to the con- 
quest and dominion of the earth. In a general couroultai^ 
or diet, he was seated on a felt, which was long afterward 
revered as a relic, and solemnly proclaimed great khan, or 
emperor, of the Moguls and Tartars. Of these kindred, 
though rival names, the former had given birth to the im- 
perial race, and the latter has been extended, by accident 
or error, over the spacious wilderness of the north. 

The code of laws which Zingis dictated to his subjects 
was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the 
exercise of foreign hostility. The punishment of death was 
inflicted on the crimes of adultery, murder, perjury, and the 
capital thefts of a horse or an ox ; and the fiercest of men 
were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. 
The future election of the great kahn was vested in the 
princes of his family and the heads of the tribes, and the 



144 GREAT LEADERS. 

regulations of the chase were essential to the pleasures and 
plenty of a Tartar camp. The victorious nation was held 
sacred from all servile labors, which were abandoned to 
slaves and strangers, and every labor was servile except 
the profession of arms. The service and discipline of the 
troops, who were armed with bows, cimeters, and iron 
maces, and divided by hundreds, thousands, and ten thou- 
sands, were the institutions of a veteran commander. Each 
officer and soldier was made responsible, under pain of 
death, for the safety and honor of his companions ; and the 
spirit of conquest breathed in the law that peace should 
never be granted unless to a vanquished and suppliant 
enemy. 

But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our 
wonder and applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, 
who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been con- 
founded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated 
the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a 
system of pure theism and perfect toleration. His first 
and only article of faith was the existence of one God, the 
author of all good, who fills by his presence the heavens 
and earth, which he has created by his power. The Tartars 
and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their peculiar 
tribes, and many of them had been converted by the for- 
eign missionaries to the religions of Moses, of Mahomet, and 
of Christ. These various systems in freedom and concord 
were taught and practiced within the precincts of the same 
camp, and the bonze, the imaum, the rabbi, the Nesto- 
rian and the Latin priest, enjoyed the same honorable ex- 
emption from service and tribute. In the mosque of Bo- 
khara, the insolent victor might trample the Koran under 
his horse's feet, but the calm legislator respected the prophets 
and pontiffs of the most hostile sects. The reason of Zingis 
was not informed by books — the khan could neither read nor 
write — and, except the tribe of the Igours, the greatest part 
of the Moguls and Tartars were as illiterate as their sover- 



GENGHIS OR ZINGIS KHAN. I45 

eign. The memory of their exploits was preserved by tra- 
dition; sixty-eight years after the death of Zingis, these 
traditions were collected and transcribed The brevity of 
their domestic annals may be supplied by the Chinese, 
Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Arabians, Greeks, Russians, 
Poles, Hungarians, and Latins ; and each nation will de- 
serve credit in the relation of their own disasters and 
defeats. 

The arms of Zingis and his lieutenants successively re- 
duced the hordes of the desert, who pitched their tents 
between the wall of China and the Volga ; and the Mogul 
emperor became the monarch of the pastoral world, the lord 
of many millions of shepherds and soldiers, who felt their 
united strength, and were impatient to rush on the mild 
and wealthy climates of the south. His ancestors had been 
the tributaries of the Chinese emperors, and Temugin him- 
self had been disgraced by a title of honor and servitude. 
The court of Pekin was astonished by an embassy from its 
former vassal, who, in the tone of the king of nations, 
exacted the tribute and obedience which he had paid, 
and who affected to treat the son of heaven as the most 
contemptible of mankind. A haughty answer disguised 
their secret apprehensions, and their fears were soon 
justified by the march of innumerable squadrons, who 
pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall. 
Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls ; ten 
only escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial 
piety of the Chinese, covered his vanguard with their cap- 
tive parents — an unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse 
of the virtue of his enemies. His invasion was supported 
by the revolt of one hundred thousand Khitans who guarded 
the frontier, yet he listened to a treaty, and a princess of 
China, three thousand horses, five hundred youths and as 
many virgins, and a tribute of gold and silk were the price 
of his retreat. In his second expedition, he compelled the 
Chinese emperor to retire beyond the Yellow River to a 
7 



146 GREAT LEADERS, 

more southern residence. The siege of Pekin was long and 
laborious ; the inhabitants were reduced by famine to deci- 
mate and devour their fellow-citizens ; when their ammu- 
nition was spent, they discharged ingots of gold and silver 
from their engines ; but the Moguls introduced a mine to 
the center of the capital, and the conflagration of the 
palace burned above thirty days. China was desolated by 
Tartar war and domestic faction, and the five northern 
provinces were added to the empire of Zingis. 

In the west he touched the dominions of Mahammed, 
sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian Gulf to 
the borders of India and Turkestan ; and who, in the proud 
imitation of Alexander the Great, forgot the servitude and 
ingratitude of his fathers to the house of Seljuk. It was 
the wish of Zingis to establish a friendly and commercial 
intercourse with the most powerful of the Moslem princes ; 
nor could he be tempted by the secret solicitations of the 
caliph of Bagdad, who sacrificed to his personal wrongs the 
safety of the Church and state. A rash and inhuman deed 
provoked and justified the Tartar arms in the invasion of 
the southern Asia. A caravan of three ambassadors and 
one hundred and fifty merchants was arrested and mur- 
dered at Otrar, by the command of Mohammed ; nor was it 
till after a demand and denial of justice, till he had prayed 
and fasted three nights on a mountain, that the Mogul em- 
peror appealed to the judgment of God and his sword. 
Our European battles, says a philosophic writer, are petty 
skirmishes, if compared to the numbers that have fought 
and fallen in the fields of Asia. Seven hundred thousand 
Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the 
standard of Zingis and his four sons. In the vast plains 
that extend to the north of the Sihon or Jaxartes, they were 
encountered by four hundred thousand soldiers of the 
sultan ; and in the first battle, which was suspended by the 
night, one hundred and sixty thousands Carizmians were 
slain. 



GENGHIS OR ZINGIS KHAN. 147 

The Persian historians will relate the sieges and reduc- 
tion of Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samarcand, Carizme, Herat, 
Merou, Nisabour, Balch, and Candahar ; and the conquest 
of the rich and populous countries of Transoxiana, Carizme, 
and Chorasan. The destructive hostilities of Attila and the 
Huns have long since been elucidated by the example of 
Zingis and the Moguls; and in this more proper place I 
shall be content to observe, that, from the Caspian to the 
Indus, they ruined a tract of many hundred miles, which 
was adorned with the habitations and labors of mankind, 
and that five centuries have not been sufficient to repair the 
ravages of four years. The Mogul conqueror yielded with 
reluctance to the murmurs of his weary and wealthy troops, 
who sighed for the enjoyment of their native land. Incum- 
bered with the spoils of Asia, he slowly measured back his 
footsteps, betrayed some pity for the misery of the van- 
quished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities 
which had been swept away by the tempest of his arms. 
After he had repassed the Oxus and Jaxartes, he was joined 
by two generals, whom he had detached with thirty thou- 
sand horse to subdue the western provinces of Persia. 
They had trampled on the nations which opposed their 
passage, penetrated through the gates of Derbend, traversed 
the Volga and the Desert, and accomplished the circuit of 
the Caspian Sea, by an expedition which had never been at- 
tempted and has never been repeated. The return of 
Zingis was signalized by the overthrow of the rebellious or 
independent kingdoms of Tartary ; and he died in the ful- 
ness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting and 
instructing his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese 
Empire. 



148 GREAT LEADERS. 



SIMON DE MONTFOET, EAEL OF 
LEICESTER. 

By JOHN EICHAED GREEN. 

[A valiant soldier, astute politician, and public-spirited reformer of 
the thirteenth century, born about 1200, died 1265. The son of that 
De Montfort who led the cruel crusade against the Albigenses of 
southern France, Simon became in early life an English subject, re- 
ceived the highest honors from Henry III, and also secured the hand 
of his sister in marriage. He sympathized with and became a leader 
of the English barons in demanding the necessary concessions to com- 
plete and enforce that great charter wrung from King John at Runny- 
mede ; and finally took up arms to constrain Henry. In the civil war 
which ensued Simon of Montfort was for the most part victorious, but 
finally found himself forsaken by the fickle baronage whose cause he 
had espoused. He was obliged to throw himself on the support of the 
people. In the last Parliament he convoked, in the year of his death, 
he summoned knights and burgesses to sit by the side of the barons 
and bishops, thus creating a new force in the English constitution, 
which wrought a great change in the political system of the country. 
He was slain and his army defeated some months later at the battle of 
Evesham by Prince Edward.] 

When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was 
rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the 
Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a 
guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with assurances 
that the storm was drifting away, and that there was noth- 
ing to fear. Henry's petulant wit broke out in his reply : 
" If I fear the thunder," said the king, " I fear you, Sir 
Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." 

The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of 
English freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a 
Simon de Montfort whose name had become memorable for 
his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in 
southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simon 



SniON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER. 149 

became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which 
he inherited through his mother, and a secret match with 
Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the second William 
^farshal, linked him to the royal house. The baronage, 
indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a 
revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head. 
Earl Richard of Cornwall ; while the censures of the Church 
on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chastity, which she had 
made at her first husband's death, were hardly averted by a 
journey to Eome. Simon returned to find the changeable 
king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a 
burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, 
soon restored to favor, and before long took his stand in the 
front rank of the patriot leaders. In 1248 he was appointed 
governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule 
and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of order 
made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. 
The complaints of the Gascons brought about an open 
breach with the king. To Earl Simon's offer of the sur- 
render of his post if the money he had spent in the royal 
service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the king 
hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false 
traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie ; " and but that 
thou bearest the name of king it had been a bad hour for 
thee when thou utteredst such a word ! " A formal recon- 
ciliation was brought about, and the earl once more re- 
turned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was 
forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his reputa- 
tion was shown in an offer which its nobles made him of 
the regency of their realm during the absence of King 
Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and 
Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of 
Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old 
ruler to do the work he had failed to do. 

Simon's character had now thoroughly developed. He 
had inherited the strict and severe piety of his father ; he was 



150 GREAT LEADERS. 

assiduous in his attendance on religious services, whether by 
night or day ; he was the friend of Grosseteste and the patron 
of the Friars. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh we 
see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in the 
perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly 
temperate ; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, 
drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in 
talk ; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense 
of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impa- 
tience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the 
great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one 
characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that 
time called his " constancy," the firm, immovable resolve 
which trampled even death under foot in its loyalty to the 
right. The motto which Edward I chose as his device, 
" Keep troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. 
We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment 
of its difficulties both at home and abroad he " thought it 
unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit " 
as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order ; but once 
undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met 
with, the failure of all support or funds from England, 
and the king's desertion of his cause, till the work was 
done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose 
in his patriotism. The letters of Grosseteste show how 
early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his 
resistance to Eome, and at the crisis of the contest he offers 
him his own support and that of his associates. He sends 
to Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste's on " the rule of a 
kingdom and of a tyranny," sealed with his own seal. He 
listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject 
of his household or his temper. " Better is a patient man," 
writes honest Friar Adam, " than a strong man, and he who 
can rule his own temper than he who storms a city." 
"What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow- 
citizens and not guard the peace of your own household ? " 



SIMON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER. 151 

It was to secure " the peace of his fellow-citizens " that 
the earl silently trained himself as the tide of misgovern- 
ment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his 
discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other 
men wavered and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic 
love of the people gathered itself round the stern, grave 
soldier who " stood like a pillar," unshaken by promise or 
threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn. 

In England affairs were going from bad to worse. The 
Pope still weighed heavily on the Church. Two solemn 
confirmations of the charter failed to bring about any com- 
pliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and again in 
1255, the great council fruitlessly renewed its demand for a 
regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to 
enforce good government was seen in their offer of a grant 
on condition that the chief officers of the crown were ap- 
pointed by the council. Henry indignantly refused the 
offer, and sold his plate to the citizens of London to find 
payment for his household. The barons were mutinous 
and defiant. " I will send reapers and reap your fields for 
you," Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk when 
he refused him aid. " And I will send you back the heads 
of your reapers," retorted the earl. Hampered by the pro- 
fusion of the court and by the refusal of supplies, the crown 
was penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry's 
acceptance of a papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in 
favor of his second son, Edmund. Shame had fallen on the 
English arms, and the king's eldest son, Edward, had been 
disastrously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. 
The tide of discontent, which was heightened by a grievous 
famine, burst its bounds in the irritation excited by the new 
demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 
1258 opened, and the barons repaired in arms to a great 
council summoned at London. The past half-century had 
shown both the strength and weakness of the charter — its 
strength as a rallying-point for the baronage, and a definite 



152 GREAT LEADERS. 

assertion of rights which the king could be made to ac- 
knowledge ; its weakness in providing no means for the en- 
forcement of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again 
and again to observe the charter, and his oath was no sooner 
taken than it was unscrupulously broken. 

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of 
the state. " Now England breathes in the hope of liberty," 
sang a poet of the time ; " the English were despised like 
dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their foes 
are vanquished." The song announces with almost legal 
precision the theory of the patriots. " He who would be in 
truth a king, he is a ' free king ' indeed if he rightly rule 
himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the 
government of his kingdom, but nothing for its destruction. 
It is one thing to rule according to a king's duty, another 
to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law. . . . Let the com- 
munity of the realm advise, and let it be known what the 
generality, to whom their own laws are best known, think 
on the matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those 
laws best ; they who make daily trial of them are best ac- 
quainted with them ; and since it is their own affairs which 
are at stake, they will take more care, and will act with an 
eye to their own peace. ... It concerns the community to 
see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal 
of the realm." The constitutional restrictions on the royal 
authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and 
decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection 
of the administrators of government, had never been so 
clearly stated before. 

It was impossible to make binding terms with an im- 
prisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to 
renew the war. A new Parliament was summoned in Janu- 
ary, 1265, to Westminster, but the weakness of the patriotic 
party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only 
twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside 
the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics. But it was just this 



EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND. 153 

sense of his weakness that drove Earl Simon to a constitu- 
tional change of mighty issue in our history. As before, he 
summoned two knights from every county. But he created 
a new force in English politics when he summoned to sit 
beside them two citizens from every borough. The attend- 
ance of delegates from the towns had long been usual in the 
county courts when any matter respecting their interests 
was in question ; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon 
that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit 
beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in 
the Parliament of the realm. 



EDWAKD I, KING OF ENGLAND. 

By JOHN EICHAED GKEEN. 

[Surnamed Longshanks, born 1239, crowned 1274, died 1307. Son 
of Henry III, he defeated and slew Simon de Montfort in his father's 
reign and took part in the fourth crusade. On his accession to the 
throne he completed the subjugation of Wales and in all ways approved 
himself an able and powerful monarch. The most signal events 
of his reign were those connected with the subjugation of Scotland. 
At first successful, it was only in the last months of his long reign 
that Robert Bruce's coronation as King of the Scots opened the way 
for a final defeat of English claims and arms under Edward IL] 

In his own time, and among his own subjects, Edward 
was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in 
the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the 
last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the de- 
scendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac 
blended for ever into an English people, England saw in 
her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national 
tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the Eng- 
lish name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward's 
very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he 
stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled ; 



154: GREAT LEADERS. 

like them willful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, in- 
domitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehen- 
sion, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the 
main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant 
of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, relig- 
ious. He inherited, indeed, from the Angevins their fierce 
and passionate wrath ; his punishments, when he punished 
in anger, were without pity ; and a priest who ventured at a 
moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance 
dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But for the 
most part his impulses were generous, trustful, averse from 
cruelty, prone to forgiveness. " No man ever asked mercy 
of me," he said, in his old age, "and was refused." The 
rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out at Falkirk, 
where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his 
refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask 
of wine which had been saved from marauders. " It is I 
who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty 
fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in 
meat or drink." A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to 
affection lay, in fact, beneath the stern imperiousness of his 
outer bearing. Every subject throughout his realm was 
drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of 
his father's death, though it gave him a crown; whose 
fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his 
mother ; whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and 
sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier rested. " I loved 
her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's 
friend the Abbot of Cluny ; " I do not cease to love her 
now she is dead." And as it was with mother and wife, so 
it was with his people at large. All the self -concentrated 
isolation of the earlier Angevins disappears in Edward. He 
was the first English king since the Conquest who loved his 
people with a personal love and craved for their love back 
again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his 
care for them the great statutes which stand in the fore- 



EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND, 155 

front of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England 
understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and 
the quarrels between king and people during his reign are 
quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant 
doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. 
Few scenes in our history are more touching than that which 
closes the long contest over the charter, when Edward stood 
face to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a 
sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong. 

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer 
impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange 
contradictions which meet us in Edward's career. Under 
the first king, whose temper was distinctly English, a foreign 
influence told most fatally on our manners, our literature, 
our national spirit. The rise of France into a compact and 
organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus was 
now making its influence dominant in Western Europe. 
The " chivalry " so familiar in Froissart, that picturesque 
mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy, 
before which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared 
to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest 
caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was 
specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in 
Edward's nature from which the baser influences of this 
chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety, save when 
it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere, 
while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous 
self-indulgence of his successors. But he was far from 
being wholly free from the taint of his age. His passion- 
ate desire was to be a model of the fashionable chivalry 
of his day. He had been famous from his very youth 
as a consummate general ; Earl Simon had admired the 
skill of his advance at Evesham, and in his Welsh cam- 
paign he had shown a tenacity and force of will which 
wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could head 
a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a commis- 



156 GREAT LEADERS. 

sariat which enabled him to move army after army across 
the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick to dis- 
cover the value of the English archery, and to employ it as 
a means of victory at Falkirk. But his fame as a general 
seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his 
fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people's love of 
hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier 
— tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endur- 
ance or action. When he encountered Adam Gurdon, a 
knight of gigantic size and renowned prowess, after Evesham, 
he forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At the 
opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a 
tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure 
which lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new 
chivalry. At his " Kound Table of Kenilworth " a hundred 
lords and ladies, " clad all in silk," renewed the faded glories 
of Arthur's court. The false air of romance which was 
soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts 
of sentimental feeling appeared in his " Vow of the Swan," 
when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before 
him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry 
exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing 
of his sympathy to the noble class, and in its exclusion of 
the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. 
" Knight without reproach " as he was, he looked calmly on 
at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in 
William Wallace nothing but a common robber. 

Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry 
in its influence on Edward's mind was the new French con- 
ception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a law- 
yer class was everywhere hardening customary into written 
rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties, such as com- 
mendation, into a definite vassalage. But it was specially 
through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and 
his successors, that the imperial theories of the Eoman law 
were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the 



ROBERT BRUCE. 157 

time. When the " sacred majesty " of the Caesars was trans- 
ferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baron- 
age, every constitutional relation was changed. The " defi- 
ance " by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became 
treason, his after-resistance "sacrilege." That Edward 
could appreciate what was sound and noble in the legal 
spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our judi- 
cature and our Parliament ; but there was something as 
congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its 
narrow technicalities. He was never willfully unjust, but he 
was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, 
prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The 
high conception of royalty which he had borrowed from St. 
Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts 
of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter 
or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good 
sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was 
incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal 
bargain which made her national independence conditional 
on the terms extorted from a claimant of her throne ; nor 
could he view in any other light but as treason the resist- 
ance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their 
fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a 
character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, 
of nobleness and meanness, that we must look for any fair 
explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in 
Edward's conduct and policy. 



EGBERT BRUCE. 

By Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON. 

[Born Lord of Aiinandale and Earl of Carrick 1274, died King of 
Scotland 1329. Robert Bruce was descended from the younger branch 
of the royal line of Scotland, to which succession had reverted by the 
death of Margaret, the "Maiden of Norway." Brought up in the 
English court, where he was a favorite of Edward I, who claimed to 



158 GREAT LEADERS. 

be over-lord of Scotland, and, as such, feudal superior of her kings, he 
had vacillated in his course in the wars which had been carried on by 
Edward to enforce that claim. In 1306 he threw off all indecision, 
accepted the Scottish crown, and was invested at Scone. Severely de- 
feated at the beginning by the lieutenants of Edward, he was relieved, 
by the death of the latter while marching to take personal command, 
of his most dangerous antagonist. Edward II for some years did not 
push aggression against Scotland, and the Scottish monarch had re- 
covered nearly all his dominions, when Edward marched against him 
with a great army. The Scots gained an overwhelming victory at the 
battle of Banuockburn in 1314, and royal Scottish authority was re- 
established. The complete independence of Scotland was not acknowl- 
edged however, till 1328, in the reign of Edward III.] 

Toward a due understanding of the extraordinary mer- 
its of Robert Bruce it is necessary to take a cursory view of 
the power with which he had to contend and of the re- 
sources of that kingdom, which, at that critical juncture, 
Providence committed to his charge. The power of Eng- 
land, against which it was his lot to struggle, was, perhaps, 
the most formidable which then existed in Europe. The 
native valor of her people, distinguished even under the 
weakest reign, was then led on and animated by a numer- 
ous and valiant feudal nobility. That bold and romantic 
spirit of enterprise which led the Norman arms to the 
throne of England and enabled Roger de Hauteville, with 
thirty followers, to win the crown of the Two Sicilies still 
animated the English nobles ; and to this hereditary spirit 
was added the remembrance of the matchless glories which 
their arms had acquired in Palestine. 

The barons who were then arrayed against Robert Bruce 
were the descendants of those iron warriors who combated 
for Christendom under the walls of Acre, and defeated the 
whole Saracen strength in the battle of Ascalon ; the ban- 
ners that were then unfurled for the conquest of Scotland 
were those which had waved victorious over the arms of 
Saladin ; and the sovereign who led them bore the crown 
that had been worn by Richard in the Holy Wars, and 



ROBERT BRUCE. I59 

wielded in his sword the terror of that mighty name at 
which even the accumulated hosts of Asia were appalled. 

Nor were the resources of England less formidable for 
nourishing and maintaining the war. The prosperity which 
had grown up with the equal laws of our Saxon ancestors, 
and which the tyranny of the early Norman kings had 
never completely extinguished, had revived and spread un- 
der the wise and beneficent reigns of Henry II and Edward 
I. The legislative wisdom of the last monarch had given 
to the English law greater improvements than it had ever 
received in any subsequent reigns, while his heroic valor had 
subdued the rebellious spirit of his barons and trained their 
united strength to submission to the throne. The acquisi- 
tion of Wales had removed the only weak point of his wide 
dominion and added a cruel and savage race to the already 
formidable mass of his armies. The navy of England al- 
ready ruled the seas, and was prepared to carry ravage and 
desolation over the wide and defenseless Scottish coast; 
while a hundred thousand men armed in the magnificent 
array of feudal war and led on by the ambition of a feudal 
nobility poured into a country which seemed destined only 
to be their prey. 

But, most of all, in the ranks of this army were found 
the intrepid yeomanry of England — that peculiar and valu- 
able body of men which has in every age contributed as 
much to the stability of English character as the celebrity 
of the English arms, and which then composed those terri- 
ble archers whose prowess rendered them so formidable to 
all the armies of Europe. These men, whose valor was 
warmed by the consciousness of personal , freedom and 
whose strength was nursed among the inclosed fields and 
green pastures of English liberty, conferred, till the dis- 
covery of firearms rendered personal accomplishments of no 
avail, a matchless advantage on the English armies. The 
troops of no other nation could produce a body of men in 
the least comparable to them, either in strength, discipline, 



160 GREAT LEADERS. 

or individual valor ; and such was the dreadful efficacy with 
which they used their weapons that not only did they 
mainly contribute to the subsequent trium2)hs of Cressy and 
Azincourt, but at Poitiers and Hamildon Hill they alone 
gained the victory, with hardly any assistance from the 
feudal tenantry. 

These troops were well known to the Scottish soldiers, 
and had established their superiority over them in many 
bloody battles, in which the utmost efforts of undisciplined 
valor had been found unavailing against their practiced dis- 
cipline and superior equipment. The very names of the 
barons who headed them were associated with an unbroken 
career of conquest and renown, and can hardly be read yet 
without a feeling of exultation. 

Names that to fear were never known, 
Bold Norfolk's Earl de Brotherton 
And Oxford's famed De Vere ; 
Ross, Montague, and Manly came, 
And Courtney's pride and Percy's fame, 
Names known too well in Scotland's war 
At Falkirk, Methoven, and Dunbar, 
Blazed broader yet in after years 
At Cressy red and fell Poitiers. 

Against this terrible force, before which in the succeed- 
ing reign the military power of France was compelled to bow, 
Bruce had to array the scanty troops of a barren land and 
the divided force of a turbulent nobility. Scotland was in 
his time fallen low, indeed, from that state of. peace and 
prosperity in which she was found at the first invasion of 
Edward I, and on which so much light has been thrown by 
the ingenious research of our own times. The disputed 
succession had sowed the seeds of inextinguishable jealousies 
among the nobles. The gold of England had corrupted 
many to betray their country's cause ; and the fatal ravages 
of English invasion had desolated the whole plains, from 
which resources for carrying on the war could be drawn. 



I 



ROBERT BRUCE. iQi 

All the heroic valor, the devoted patriotism, and the 
personal prowess of Wallace had been unable to stem the 
torrent of English invasion ; and when he died the whole 
nation seemed to sink under the load against which his un- 
exampled fortitude had long enabled it to struggle. These 
unhappy jealousies among the nobles, to which his down- 
fall was owing, still continued and almost rendered hopeless 
any attempt to combine their forces; while the thinned 
population and ruined husbandry of the country seemed to 
prognosticate nothing but utter extirpation from a continu- 
ance of the war. Nor was the prospect less melancholy 
from a consideration of the combats which had taken place. 
The short spear and light shield of the Scotch had been 
found utterly unavailing against the iron panoply and 
powerful horses of the English barons, while the hardy and 
courageous mountaineers perished in vain under the dread- 
ful tempest of the English archery. 

What, then, must have been the courage of the youth- 
ful prince, who, after having been driven for shelter to an 
island on the north of Ireland, could venture with only forty 
followers to raise the standard of independence in Scotland 
against the accumulated force of this mighty power ! What 
the resources of that understanding, which, though inti- 
mately acquainted from personal service with the tried su- 
periority of the English arms, could foresee in his barren 
and exhausted country the means of combatting them ! 
What the ability of that political conduct which could re- 
unite the jarring interests and smother the deadly feuds of 
the Scottish nobles ! And what the capacity of that noble 
warrior who, in the words of the contemporary historian,* 
could " unite the prowess of the first knight to the conduct 
of the greatest general of his age," and was able in the space 
of six years to raise the Scottish arms from the lowest point 
of depression to such a pitch of glory that even the re- 

* Froissart's " Chronicles." 



162 GREAT LEADERS. 

doubted archers and haughty chivahy of England fled at 
the sight of the Scottish banner ! 

Nor was it only in the field that the great and patriotic 
conduct of Kobert Bruce was displayed. In endeavor to 
restore the almost ruined fortunes of his country and to 
heal the wounds which a war of unparalleled severity had 
brought upon this people he exhibited the same wise and 
beneficent policy. Under his auspicious rule, husbandry 
revived, arts were encouraged, and the turbulent barons 
were awed into subjection. Scotland recovered during his 
administration in a great measure from the devastation that 
had preceded it ; and the peasants, forgetting the stern war- 
rior in the beneficent monarch, long remembered his sway 
under the name of the " good King Kobert 's reign." 

But the greatness of his character appeared most of all 
from the events that occurred after his death. When the 
capacity with which he and his worthy associates Eandolph 
and Douglas had counterbalanced the superiority of English 
arms was withdrawn, the fabric which they had supported 
fell to the ground. In the very first battle which was 
fought after his death at Hamildon Hill, a larger army than 
that which conquered at Bannockburn was overthrown by 
the archers of England, without a single knight couching 
his spear. Never at any subsequent period was Scotland 
able to stand the more powerful arms of the English yeo- 
manry. Thenceforward her military history is little more 
than a melancholy catalogue of continued defeats, occa- 
sioned rather by treachery on the part of her nobles or in- 
capacity in her generals than any defect of valor in her 
soldiers ; and the independence of the monarchy was main- 
tained rather by the terror which the name of Bruce and 
the remembrance of Bannockburn had inspired than by 
the achievements of any of the successors to his throne. 

The merits of Eobert Bruce as a warrior are very gener- 
ally acknowledged ; and the eyes of Scottish patriotism turn 
with the greater exultation to his triumphs from the con- 



I 



EDWARD in, KING OF ENGLAND. \Q^ 

trast which their splendor affords to the barren annals of 
the subsequent reigns. But the important consequences of 
his victories are not sufficiently appreciated. But for his 
bold and unconquerable spirit, Scotland might have shared 
with Ireland the severity of English conquest ; and instead 
of exulting now in the prosperity of our country, the ener- 
gy of our peasantry, and the patriotic spirit of our resident 
landed proprietors, we might have been deploring with her 
an absent nobility, an oppressive tenantry, a bigoted and 
ruined people. 



EDWAED III, KING OF ENGLAND. 

By DAVID HUME. 

[Son of Edward II of England and Isabella of France, born 1312, 
crowned 1327, died 1377. Edward achieved the highest renown by his 
Scotch and French wars, the latter of which he undertook as claimant 
of the French throne through his mother. Though the latter part of 
his life was marked by many misfortunes, the achievements of his 
reign stamp it as among the most important in the earlier English 
annals. It was not until this period that the English language be- 
came universally recognized as the national speech, and the various 
race elements were thoroughly welded and made homogeneous.] 

The English are apt to consider with peculiar fond- 
ness the history of Edward III, and to esteem his reign, 
as it was one of the longest, the most glorious, also, that 
occurs in the annals of their nation. The ascendant which 
they then began to acquire over France, their rival and 
supposed national enemy, makes them cast their eyes on 
this period with great complacency, and sanctifies every 
measure which Edward embraced for that end. But the 
domestic government of this prince is really more ad- 
mirable than his foreign victories; and England enjoyed, 
by the prudence and vigor of his administration, a longer 
interval of domestic peace and tranquillity than she had 



164 GREAT LEADERS. 

been blessed with in any former period, or than she ex- 
perienced for many ages after. He gained the affections 
of the great, yet curbed their licentiousness; he made 
them feel his power, without their daring, or even being 
inclined, to murmur at it; his affable and obliging be- 
havior, his munificence and generosity, made them sub- 
mit with pleasure to his dominion; his valor and con- 
duct made them successful in most of their enterprises; 
and their unquiet spirits, directed against a public enemy, 
had no leisure to breed those disturbances to which they 
were naturally so much inclined, and which the frame of 
the government seemed so much to authorize. 

This was the chief benefit which resulted from Edward's 
victories and conquests. His foreign -wars were in other 
respects neither founded in justice nor directed to any 
salutary purpose. His attempt against the King of Scot- 
land, a minor and a brother-in-law, and the revival of his 
grandfather's claim of superiority over that kingdom were 
both unreasonable and ungenerous ; and he allowed himself 
to be too easily seduced, by the glaring prospect of French 
conquests, from the acquisition of a point which was prac- 
ticable, and which, if attained, might really have been of 
lasting utility to his country and his successors. The suc- 
cess which he met with in France, though chiefly owing to 
his eminent talents, was unexpected ; and yet from the very 
nature of things, not from any unforeseen accidents, was 
found, even during his lifetime, to have procured him no 
solid advantages. But the glory of a conqueror is so daz- 
zling to the vulgar, the animosity of nations is so violent, 
that the fruitless desolation of so fine a part of Europe as 
France is totally disregarded by us, and is never considered 
as a blemish in the character or conduct of this prince ; 
and, indeed, from the unfortunate state of human nature, 
it will commonly happen that a sovereign of genius, such 
as Edward, who usually finds everything easy in his domestic 
government, will turn himself toward military enterprises, 



EDWARD III, KING OF ENGLAND. 165 

where alone he meets with opposition, and where he has full 
exercise for his industry and capacity. 

It is remarked by an elegant historian that conquerors, 
though usually the bane of human kind, proved often, in 
those feudal times, the most indulgent of sovereigns. They 
stood most in need of supplies from their people ; and not 
being able to compel them by force to submit to the neces- 
sary impositions, they were obliged to make them some 
compensation by equitable laws and popular concessions. 
This remark is, in some measure, though imperfectly, justi- 
fied by the conduct of Edward III. He took no steps of 
moment Avithout consulting his Parliament and obtaining 
their approbation, which he afterward pleaded as a reason for 
their supporting his measures. The Parliament, therefore, 
rose into greater consideration during his reign, and acquired 
more regular authority than in any former time ; and even 
the House of Commons, which during turbulent and fac- 
tious periods, was naturally depressed by the greater power 
of the crown and barons, began to appear of some weight in 
the constitution. In the later years of Edward, the king's 
ministers were impeached in Parliament, particularly Lord 
Latimer, who fell a sacrifice to the authority of the Com- 
mons ; and they even obliged the king to banish his mistress 
by their remonstrances. Some attention was also paid to 
the election of their members ; and lawyers, in particular, 
who were at that time men of character somewhat inferior, 
were totally excluded from the House during several Parlia- 
ments. 

Edward granted about twenty parliamentary confirma- 
tions of the great charter ; and these concessions are com- 
monly appealed to as proofs of his great indulgence to the 
people and his tender regard for their liberties. But the 
contrary presumption is more natural. If the maxims of 
Edward's reign had not been in general somewhat arbitrary, 
and if the great charter had not been frequently violated, 
the Parliament would never have applied for these frequent 



166 GREAT LEADERS. 

confirmations, which could add no force to a deed regularly 
observed, and which could serve to no other purpose than 
to prevent the contrary precedents from turning into a rule, 
and acquiring authority. It was indeed the effect of the 
irregular government during those ages that a statute 
which had been enacted some years, instead of acquiring, 
was imagined to lose force by time, and needed to be often 
renewed by recent statutes of the same sense and tenor. 
Hence, likewise, that general clause, so frequent in old acts 
of Parliament, that the statutes enacted by the king's pro- 
genitors should be observed — a precaution which, if we do 
not consider the circumstances of the times, might appear 
absurd and ridiculous. The frequent confirmations of the 
privileges of the Church proceeded from the same cause. 

There is not a reign among those of the ancient Eng- 
lish monarchs which deserves more to be studied than that 
of Edward III, nor one where the domestic transactions 
will better discover the true genius of that kind of mixed 
government which was then established in England. The 
struggles with regard to the validity and authority of the 
great charter were now over ; the king was acknowledged to 
lie under some limitations ; Edward himself was a prince of 
great capacity, not governed by favorites, not led astray by 
any unruly passion, sensible that nothing could be more es- 
sential to his interest than to keep on good terms with his 
people ; yet, on the whole, it appears, that the government 
at best was only a barbarous monarchy, not regulated by 
any fixed maxims nor bounded by any certain undisputed 
rights which in practice were regularly observed. The 
king conducted himself by one set of principles, the barons 
by another, the Commons by a third, the clergy by a 
fourth. All these systems of government were opposite and 
incompatible ; each of them prevailed in its turn, as inci- 
dents were favorable to it ; a great prince rendered the mo- 
narchical power predominant ; the weakness of a king gave 
reins to the aristocracy : a superstitious age saw the clergy 



RIENZI. 16^^ 

triumphant ; the people, for whom chiefly government was 
instituted, and who chiefly deserve consideration, were the 
weakest of the whole. But the Commons, little obnoxious 
to any other order, though they sunk under the violence of 
tempests, silently reared their head in more peaceable times ; 
and while the storm was brewing were courted on all sides, 
and thus received still some accession to their privileges, or 
at worst some confirmation of them. 



EIENZI. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Cola Gabrini Rienzi, the " last of the Roman tribunes," born about 
1312, died by assassination during a popular emeute, 1354. Inspired 
by his patriotic enthusiasm and made powerful by his eloquence, Rienzi, 
during the troubles in Rome ensuing on the removal of the Papal See 
to Avignon, organized an insurrection against the turbulent and fac- 
tious nobles. The latter were crushed and driven from Rome, and 
Rienzi rose to supreme power under the title of " tribune." Success, 
however, corrupted the republican virtues of the parvenu tribune of 
the new republic ; and his arrogance and splendor soon laid heavy 
burdens of taxation on the people, which provoked a reaction. He 
was finally driven from power and compelled to seek safety in flight. 
The return of the barons and their iron oppression, however, paved the 
way for the successful return of Rienzi to the chief magistracy in 1354. 
Unwarned by experience he again resumed the pomp and pride of 
royalty, and was shortly after killed in an insurrection of the citizens 
of Rome.] 

Ik a quarter of the city which was inhabited only by 
mechanics and Jews, the marriage of an innkeeper and a 
washerwoman produced the future deliverer of Eome. From 
such parents Nicholas Rienzi Gabrini could inherit neither 
dignity nor fortune; and the gift of a liberal education, 
which they painfully bestowed, was the cause of his glory 
and untimely end. The study of history and eloquence, 
the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Livy, Caesar, and Valerius 



- 168 GREAT LEADERS. 

Maximus elevated above his equals and contemporaries the 
genius of the young plebeian ; he perused with indefati- 
gable diligence the manuscripts and marbles of antiquity ; 
loved to dispense his knowledge in familiar language ; and 
was often provoked to exclaim : " Where are now these Ro- 
mans ? their virtue, their justice, their power ? Why was I 
not born in those happy times ? " When the republic ad- 
dressed to the throne of Avignon an embassy of the three 
orders, the spirit and eloquence of Eienzi recommended him 
to a place among the thirteen deputies of the commons. 
The orator had the honor of haranguing Pope Clement VI, 
and the satisfaction of conversing with Petrarch, a con- 
genial mind ; but his aspiring hopes were chilled by disgrace 
and poverty, and the patriot was reduced to a single gar- 
ment and the charity of the hospital. From this misery he 
was relieved by the sense of merit or smile of favor ; and 
the employment of apostolic notary afforded him a daily 
stipend of five gold florins, a more honorable and extensive 
connection, and the right of contrasting, both in words and 
actions, his own integrity with the vices of the state. The 
eloquence of Rienzi was prompt and persuasive ; the multi- 
tude is always prone to envy and censure ; he was stimulated 
by the loss of a brother and the impunity of the assassins ; 
nor was it possible to excuse or exaggerate the public ca- 
lamities. 

A prophecy, or rather a summons, affixed on the church 
door of St. George, was the first public evidence of his de- 
signs ; a nocturnal (May 20, A. d. 1347) assembly of a hun- 
dred citizens on Mount Aventine, the first step to their 
execution. After an oath of secrecy and aid, he represented 
to the conspirators the importance and facility of their en- 
terprise ; that the nobles, without union or resources, were 
strong only in the fear of their imaginary strength ; that all 
power, as well as right, was in the hands of the people ; that 
the revenues of the apostolical chamber might relieve the 
public distress ; and that the Pope himself would approve 



RIENZI. 169 

their victory over the common enemies of government and 
freedom. After securing a faithful band to protect his first 
declaration, he proclaimed through the city, by sound of 
trumpet, that on the evening of the following day all persons 
should assemble without arms before the church of St. An- 
gelo to provide for the re-establishment of the good estate. 
The whole night was employed in the celebration of thirty 
masses of the Holy Ghost, and in the morning, Rienzi, 
bareheaded, but in complete armor, issued from the church, 
encompassed by the hundred conspirators. 

The Pope's vicar, the simple Bishop of Orvieto, who had 
been persuaded to sustain a part in this singular ceremony, 
marched on his right hand, and three great standards were 
borne aloft as the emblems of their design. In the first, the 
banner of liberty^ Rome was seated on two lions, with a palm 
in one hand and a globe in the other ; St. Paul, with a drawn 
sword, was delineated in the banner of justice; and in the 
third, St. Peter held the keys of concord and peace. Rienzi 
was encouraged by the presence and applause of an in- 
numerable crowd, who understood little and hoped much ; 
and the procession slowly rolled forward from the castle of 
St. Angelo to the Capitol. His triumph was disturbed by 
some secret emotions which he labored to suppress ; he as- 
cended without opposition, and with seeming confidence, 
the citadel of the republic, harangued the people from the 
balcony, and received the most flattering confirmation of 
his acts and laws. The nobles, as if destitute of arms and 
counsels, beheld in silent consternation this strange revolu- 
tion ; and the moment had been prudently chosen, when 
the most formidable, Stephen Colonna, was absent from the 
city. On the first rumor, he returned to his palace, affected 
to despise this plebeian tumult, and declared to the messen- 
ger of Rienzi that at his leisure he would cast the madman 
from the windows of the Capitol. The great bell instantly 
rang an alarm, and so rapid was the tide, so urgent was the 
danger, that Colonna escaped with precipitation to the sub- 



170 GREAT LEADERS. 

urb of St. Laurence ; from thence, after a moment's refresh- 
ment, he continued the same speedy career till he reached in 
safety his castle of Palestrina, lamenting his own impru- 
dence, which had not trampled the spark of this mighty 
conflagration. A general and peremptory order was issued 
from the Capitol to all the nobles that they should peaceably 
retire to their estates ; they obeyed, and their departure 
secured the tranquillity of the free and obedient citizens of 
Rome. 

Never, perhaps, has the energy and effect of a single 
mind been more remarkably felt than in the sudden though 
transient reformation of Rome by the tribune Rienzi. A 
den of robbers was converted to the discipline of a camp 
or convent ; patient to hear, swift to redress, inexorable to 
punish, his tribunal was always accessible to the poor and 
stranger ; nor could birth or dignity or the immunities of 
the Church protect the offender or his accomplices. The 
privileged houses, the private sanctuaries in Rome, on which 
no officer of justice would presume to trespass, were abol- 
ished ; and he applied the timber and iron of their barri- 
cades in the fortifications of the Capitol. The venerable 
father of the Colonna was exposed in his own palace to the 
double shame of being desirous and of being unable to pro- 
tect a criminal. A mule, with a jar of oil, had been stolen 
near Capranica, and the lord of the Ursini family was con- 
demned to restore the damage and to discharge a fine of 
four hundred florins for his negligence in guarding the 
highways. Nor were the persons of the barons more invio- 
late than their lands or houses, and, either from accident or 
design, the same impartial rigor was exercised against the 
heads of the adverse factions. 

Peter Agapet Colonna, who had himself been senator of 
Rome, was arrested in the street for injury or debt ; and 
justice was appeased by the tardy execution of Martin Ur- 
sini, who, among his various acts of violence and rapine, 
had pillaged a shipwi'ecked vessel at the mouth of the Tiber. 



RIENZL 171 

His name, the purple of two cardinals, his uncles, a recent 
marriage, and a mortal disease were disregarded by the in- 
flexible tribune, who had chosen his victim. The public 
officers dragged him from his palace and nuptial bed ; his 
trial was short and satisfactory ; the bell of the Capitol con- 
vened the people. Stripped of his mantle, on his knees, 
with his hands bound behind his back, he heard the sen- 
tence of death, and, after a brief confession, Ursini was led 
away to the gallows. After such an example, none who 
were conscious of guilt could hope for impunity, and the 
flight of the wicked, the licentious, and the idle soon puri- 
fied the city and territory of Eome. In this time (says the 
historian) the woods began to rejoice that they were no 
longer infested with robbers ; the oxen began to plow ; the 
pilgrims visited the sanctuaries; the roads and inns were 
replenished with travelers; trade, plenty, and good faith 
were restored in the markets ; and a purse of gold might be 
exposed without danger in the midst of the highway. As 
soon as the life and property of the subject are secure, the 
labors and rewards of industry spontaneously revive. Rome 
was still the metropolis of the Christian world, and the fame 
and fortunes of the tribune were diffused in every country 
by the strangers who had enjoyed the blessings of his gov- 
ernment. 

The deliverance of his country inspired Rienzi with a 
vast and perhaps visionary idea of uniting Italy in a great 
federative republic, of which Rome should be the ancient 
and lawful head, and the free cities and princes the members 
and associates. His pen was not less eloquent than his 
tongue, and his numerous epistles were delivered to swift 
and trusty messengers. On foot, with a white wand in their 
hand, they traversed the forests and mountains ; enjoyed, in 
the most hostile states, the sacred security of ambassadors ; 
and reported, in the style of flattery or truth, that the high- 
ways along their passage were lined with kneeling multi- 
tudes, who implored Heaven for the success of their under- 



172 GREAT LEADERS. 

taking. Beyond the Alps, more especially at Avignon, the 
revolution was the theme of curiosity, wonder, and applause. 
Petrarch had been the private friend, perhaps the secret 
counselor, of Eienzi ; his writings breathe the most ardent 
spirit of patriotism and joy ; and all respect for the Pope, 
all gratitude for the Colonna, was lost in the superior duties 
of a Roman citizen. The poet-laureate of the Capitol main- 
tains the act, applauds the hero, and mingles with some ap- 
prehension and advice the most lofty hopes of the perma- 
nent and rising greatness of the republic. 

While Petrarch indulged these prophetic visions the 
Roman hero was fast declining from the meridian of fame 
and power ; and the people who had gazed with astonish- 
ment on the ascending meteor began to mark the irregu- 
larity of its course and the vicissitudes of light and ob- 
scurity. More eloquent than judicious, more enterprising 
than resolute, the faculties of Rienzi were not balanced by 
cool and commanding reason; he magnified in a tenfold 
proportion the objects of hope and fear; and prudence, 
which could not have erected, did not presume to fortify his 
throne. In the blaze of prosperity his virtues were insen- 
sibly tinctured with the adjacent vices — justice with cruelty, 
liberality with profusion, and the desire of fame with puerile 
and ostentatious vanity. He might have learned that the 
ancient tribunes, so strong and sacred in the public opin- 
ion, were not distinguished in style, habit, or appearance 
from an ordinary plebeian ; and that as often as they visited 
the city on foot a single viator^ or beadle, attended the ex- 
ercise of their office. The Gracchi would have frowned or 
smiled could they have read the sonorous titles and epithets 
of their successor, "Nicholas, severe aj^^d merciful; 

DELIVERER OF ROME ; DEFENDER OF ItALY ; FRIEND OF 
MANKIND, AND OF LIBERTY, PEACE, AND JUSTICE ; TRIB- 
UNE AUGUST." His theatrical pageants had prepared the 
revolution ; but Rienzi abused, in luxury and pride, the po- 
litical maxim of speaking to the eyes as well as the under- 



TIMOUR OR TAMERLANE. I73 

standing of the multitude. From nature he had received 
the gift of a handsome person till it was swelled and disfig- 
ured by intemperance ; and his propensity to laughter was 
corrected in the magistrate by the affectation of gravity and 
sternness. He was clothed, at least on public occasions, in 
a party-colored robe of velvet or satin lined with fur and 
embroidered with gold. The rod of Justice, which he car- 
ried in his hand, was a scepter of polished steel, crowned 
with a globe and cross of gold, and inclosing a small frag- 
ment of the true and holy wood. In his civil and religious 
processions through the city he rode on a white steed, the 
symbol of royalty. The great banner of the republic, a sun 
with a circle of stars, a dove with an olive-branch, was dis- 
played over his head ; a shower of gold and silver was scat- 
tered among the populace ; fifty guards with halberds en- 
compassed his person ; a troop of horse preceded his march, 
and their cymbals and trumpets were of massy silver. 

Tliese extraordinary spectacles might deceive or flatter 
the people ; and their own vanity was gratified in the vanity 
of their leader. But in his private life he soon deviated 
from the strict rule of frugality and abstinence ; and the 
plebeians, who were awed by the splendor of the nobles, were 
provoked by the luxury of their equal. His wife, his son, his 
uncle (a barber in name and profession), exposed the con- 
trast of vulgar manners and princely expense ; and without 
acquiring the majesty, Kienzi degenerated into the vices of 
a king. 

TIMOUK OR TAMERLANE. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Tamerlane, corruption of Tiraour Lenk (" the lame "), born 1336, 
died 1405. One of the greatest conquerors of history, he was a second 
Genghis Khan, whom he resembled much in character. His de- 
scendants speedily lost the greater part of his conquests, and the last 
of his family fell before the power of the English East India Company 



174 GREAT LEADERS, 

in India, of which he had become a mere pensioner, though nominally 
the " Great Mogul " and Emperor of Delhi.] 

The conquest and monarchy of the world was the first 
object of the ambition of Timour. To live in the memory 
and esteem of future ages was the second wish of his mag- 
nanimous spirit. All the civil and military transactions of 
his reign were diligently recorded in the journals of his 
secretaries ; the authentic narrative was revised by the per- 
sons best informed of each particular transaction, and it is be- 
lieved in the empire and family of Timour that the monarch 
himself composed the " Commentaries " of his life and the 
" Institutions " of his government. But these cares were in- 
effectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious 
memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed 
from the world, or at least from the knowledge of Europe. 
The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and im- 
potent revenge ; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of 
calumny which had disfigured the J3irth and character, the 
person, and even the name of Tamerlane. Yet his real merit 
would be enhanced, rather than debased, by the elevation of 
a peasant to the throne of Asia ; nor can his lameness be a 
theme of reproach, unless he had the weakness to blush at a 
natural, or perhaps an honorable, infirmity. 

In the eyes of the Moguls, who held the indefeasible suc- 
cession of the house of Zingis, he was doubtless a rebel sub- 
ject ; yet he sprang from the noble tribe of Berlass ; his 
fifth ancestor, Carashar Nevian, had been the vizier of 
Zagatai in his new realm of Transoxiana ; and in the ascent 
of some generations the branch of Timour is confounded, 
at least by the females, with the imperial stem. He was 
born forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in the village 
of Sebzar, in the fruitful territory of Cash, of which his 
fathers were the hereditary chiefs, as well as of a toman of 
ten thousand horse. His birth was cast on one of those 
periods of anarchy which announce the fall of the Asiatic 
dynasties, and opened a new field to adventurous ambition. 



TIMOUR OR TAMERLANE, 175 

The khans of Zagatai were extinct, the emirs aspired to in- 
dependence, and their domestic feuds could only be sus- 
pended by the conquest and tyranny of the khans of Kash- 
gar, who, with an army of Getes or Calmucks, invaded the 
Transoxian kingdom. 

From the twelfth year of his age, Timour had entered 
the field of action ; in the twenty-fifth he stood forth as the 
deliverer of his country; and the eyes and wishes of the 
people were turned toward a hero who suffered in their 
cause. The chiefs of the law and of the army had pledged 
their salvation to support him with their lives and fortunes ; 
but in the hour of danger they were silent and afraid ; and, 
after waiting seven days on the hills of Samarcand, he re- 
treated to the desert with only sixty horsemen. The fugi- 
tives were overtaken by a thousand Getes, whom he repulsed 
with incredible slaughter, and his enemies were forced to 
exclaim, "Timour is a wonderful man; fortune and the 
divine favor are with him." But in this bloody action his 
own followers were reduced to ten, a number which was 
soon diminished by the desertion of three Oarizmians. He 
wandered in the desert with his wife, seven companions, 
and four horses ; and sixty- two days was he plunged in a 
loathsome dungeon, whence he escaped by his own courage 
and the remorse of the oppressor. After swimming the 
broad and rapid stream of the Jihoon, or Oxus, he led, dur- 
ing some months, the life of a vagrant and outlaw, on the 
borders of the adjacent states. But his fame shone brighter 
in adversity; he learned to distinguish the friends of his 
person, the associates of his fortune, and to apply the various 
characters of men for their advantage, and above all for his 
own. On his return to his native country, Timour was suc- 
cessively joined by the parties of his confederates, who anx- 
iously sought him in the desert ; nor can I refuse to describe, 
in his pathetic simplicity, one of their fortunate encounters. 
He presented himself as a guide to three chiefs, who were 
at the head of seventy horse. " When their eyes fell upon 



176 GREAT LEADERS. 

me," says Timour, " they were overwhelmed with joy ; and 
they ahghted from their horses; and they came and kneeled; 
and they kissed my stirrup. I also came down from my 
horse, and took each of them in my arms. And I put my 
turban on the head of the first chief ; and my girdle, rich in 
jewels and wrought with gold, I bound on the loins of the 
second; and the third, I clothed in my own coat. And 
they wept, and I wept also ; and the hour of prayer was 
arrived, and we prayed. And we mounted our horses, and 
came to my dwelling ; and I collected my people, and made 
a feast." 

His trusty bands were soon increased by the bravest of 
the tribes ; he led them against a superior foe, and after 
some vicissitudes of war, the Getes were finally driven from 
the kingdom of Transoxiana. He had done much for his 
own glory, but much remained to be done, much art to be 
exerted, and some blood to be sj)illed, before he could teach 
his equals to obey him as their master. The birth and 
power of Emir Houssein compelled him to accept a vicious 
and unworthy colleague, whose sister was the best belo\ed 
of his wives. Their union was short and jealous ; but the 
policy of Timour in their frequent quarrels exposed his 
rival to the reproach of injustice and perfidy ; and, after a 
small defeat, Houssein was slain by some sagacious friends, 
who presumed, for the last time, to disobey the commands 
of their lord. 

At the age of thirty-four, and in a general diet or 
cotirouUai, he was invested with imperial command, but he 
affected to revere the house of Zingis ; and while the Emir 
Timour reigned over Zagatai and the East, a nominal khan 
served as a private officer in the armies of his servant. A 
fertile kingdom, five hundred miles in length and in breadth, 
might have satisfied the ambition of a subject ; but Timour 
aspired to the dominion of the world, and before his death 
the crown of Zagatai was one of the twenty-seven crowns 
which he had placed on his head. 



TIMOUR OR TAMRELANE. 177 

The fame of Timour has pervaded the East and West ; 
his posterity is still invested with the imperial title ; and 
the admiration of his subjects, who revered him almost as 
a deity, may be justified in some degree by the praise or 
confession of his bitterest enemies. Although he was lame 
of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not unworthy 
of his rank ; and his vigorous health, so essential to him- 
self and to the world, was corroborated by temperance and 
exercise. In his familiar discourse he was grave and mod- 
est, and, if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he spoke 
with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. 
It was his delight to converse with the learned on topics of 
history and science ; and the amusement of his leisure hours 
was the game of chess, which he improved or corrupted 
with new refinements. In his religion he was a zealous 
though not perhaps an orthodox Mussulman ; but his sound 
understanding may tempt us to believe, that a superstitious 
reverence for omens and prophecies, for saints and astrolo- 
gers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. 

In the government of a vast empire, he stood alone and 
absolute, without a rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to 
seduce his affections, or a minister to mislead his judgment. 
It was his firmest maxim that, whatever might be the con- 
sequence, the word of the prince should never be disputed 
or recalled ; but his foes have maliciously observed that the 
commands of anger and destruction were more strictly exe- 
cuted than those of beneficeilce and favor. His sons and 
grandsons, of whom Timour left six- and- thirty at his de- 
cease, were his first and most submissive subjects ; and when- 
ever they deviated from their duty they were corrected, 
according to the laws of Zingis, with the bastinado, and 
afterward restored to honor and command. Perhaps his 
heart was not devoid of the social virtues ; perhaps he was 
not incapable of loving his friends and pardoning his ene- 
mies ; but the rules of morality are founded on the public 
interest, and it may be sufficient to applaud the wisdom of a 



178 GREAT LEADERS, 

monarch, for the liberality by which he is not impoverished, 
and for the justice by which he is strengthened and en- 
riched. To maintain the harmony of authority and obedi- 
ence, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to reward 
the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his domin- 
ions, to secure the traveler and merchant, to restrain the 
depredations of the soldier, to cherish the labors of the 
husbandman, to encourage industry and learning, and, by 
an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the revenue, 
without increasing the taxes — are indeed the duties of a 
prince ; but, in the discharge of these duties, he finds an 
ample and immediate recompense. Timour might boast 
that at his accession to the throne Asia was the prey of 
anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous monarchy 
a child, fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold 
from the east to the west. Such was his confidence of 
merit, that from this reformation he derived an excuse for 
his victories and a title to universal dominion. 

The following observations will serve to appreciate his 
claim to the public gratitude ; and perhaps we shall con- 
clude that the Mogul emperor was rather tlie scourge than 
the benefactor of mankind. If some partial disorders, 
some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of Timour, 
the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By 
their rapine, cruelty, and discord, the petty tyrants of Persia 
might afflict their subjects ; but whole nations were crushed 
under the footsteps of the reformer. The ground which 
had been occupied by flourishing cities, was often marked 
by his abominable trophies — by columns or pyramids of 
human heads. Astrakhan, Carizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, 
Aleppo, Damascus, Boursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others 
were sacked or burned or utterly destroyed in his presence 
and by his troops ; and perhaps his conscience would have 
been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared to num- 
ber the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the 
establishment of peace and order. His most destructive 



TIMOUR OR TAMERLANE. I79 

wars were rather inroads than conquests. He invaded 
Turkistan, Kipzak, Kussia, Hindostan, Syria, Anatolia, Ar- 
menia, and Georgia, without a hope or a desire of preserv- 
ing those distant provinces. Thence he departed laden 
with spoil ; but he left behind him neither troops to awe 
the contumacious, nor magistrates to protect the obedient 
natives. When he had broken the fabric of their ancient 
government he abandoned them to the evils which his in- 
vasion had aggravated or caused ; nor were these evils com- 
pensated by any present or possible benefits. 

The kingdoms of Tran'soxiana and Persia were the 
proper field which he labored to cultivate and adorn as the 
perpetual inheritance of his family. But his peaceful 
labors were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by 
the absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the 
Volga or the Ganges, his servants, and even his sons, forgot 
their master and their duty. The public and private in- 
juries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor of inquiry 
and punishment ; and we must be content to praise the 
" Institutions " of Timour, as the specious idea of a perfect 
monarchy. Whatsoever might be the blessings of his ad- 
ministration, they evaporated with his life. To reign, 
rather than to govern, was the ambition of his children and 
grandchildren — the enemies of each other and of the people. 
A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by 
Sharokh, his youngest son ; but after Ids decease, the scene 
was again involved in darkness and blood, and, before the 
end of a century, Transoxiana and Persia were trampled 
by the Uzbecks from the north, and the Turkomans of the 
black and white sheep. The race of Timour would have 
been extinct, if a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, 
had not fled before the Uzbeck arms to the conquest of 
Hindostan. His successors (the great Moguls) extended 
their sway from the mountains of Cashmir to Cape Comorin, 
and from Candahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign 
of Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved, the treasures 



180 GREAT LEADERS. 

of Delhi have been rifled by a Persian robber, and the 
richest of their kingdoms is now possessed by a company 
of Christian merchants, of a remote island in the north- 
ern ocean.* 

JEANNE D'AEC. 

By JOHN EICHAED GEEEN. 

[A French heroine, otherwise known as La Pucelle and the Maid of 
Orleans, date of birth uncertain, burned at the stake by English in- 
fluence as a sorceress at fiouen in 1431. Her enthusiasm and the 
belief in the supernatural mission so inspired the French and daunted 
the English as to turn the tide of war against the latter, and was a 
main cause of ending that series of English invasions which had im- 
periled the national existence of France.] 

Jeanke d'Arc was the child of a laborer of Domremy, 
a little Tillage in the neighborhood of Vaucouleurs on the 
borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the cot- 
tage where she was born began the great woods of the 
Vosges, where the children of Domremy drank in poetry and 
legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their flower 
garlands on the sacred trees, and sang songs to the " good 
people," who might not drink of the fountain because of 
their sins. Jeanne loved the forest; its birds and beasts 
came lovingly to her at her childish call. But at home 
men saw nothing in her but " a good girl, simple and pleas- 
ant in her ways," spinning and sewing by her mother's side 
while the other girls went to the fields, attended to the poor 
and sick, fond of church, and listening to the church-bell 
with a dreamy passion of delight which never left her. The 
quiet life was soon broken by the storm of war as it at last 
came home to Domremy. As the outcasts and wounded 

* The reader scarcely needs to be informed that, in the time of 
Gibbon, the British East India Company was the practical maister of 
Hindostan. 



JEANNE UARC. 181 

passed by the young peasant-girl gave them her bed and 
nursed them in their sickness. Her whole nature summed 
itself up in one absorbing passion : she " had pity," to use 
the phrase forever on her lip, " on the fair realm of France." 
As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a 
maid from the Lorraine border should save the land ; she 
saw visions ; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blind- 
ing light, and bade her go to the help of the king and re- 
store to him his realm. " Messire," answered the girl, " I am 
but a poor maiden ; I know not how to ride to the wars, or 
to lead men-at-arms." The archangel returned to give her 
courage, and to tell her of "the pity "that there was in 
heaven for the fair realm of France. The girl wept, and 
longed that the angels who appeared to her would carry her 
away, but her mission ^yas clear. It was in vain that her 
father, when he heard her purpose, swore to drown her ere 
she should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain 
that the priest, the wise people of the village, the captain of 
Vaucouleurs, doubted and refused to aid her. " I must go 
to the king," persisted the peasant-girl, " even if I wear my 
limbs to the very knees. ... I had far rather rest and spin 
by my mother's side," she pleaded, with a touching pathos, 
" for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do 
it, for my Lord wills it." " And who," they asked, " is your 
Lord ? " " He is God." Words such as these touched the 
rough captain at last ; he took Jeanne by the hand and 
swore to lead her to the king. When she reached Chinon 
she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved 
from their books that they ought not to believe her. 
" There is more in God's book than in yours," Jeanne an- 
swered, simply. At last Charles received her in the midst of 
a throng of nobles and soldiers. " Gentle Dauphin," said 
the girl, " my name is Jeanne the Maid. The heavenly 
King sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and 
crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant 
of the heavenly King who is the King of France." 



182 GREAT LEADERS. 

The girl was in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, 
with all the vigor and activity of her peasant rearing, able 
to stay from dawn to nightfall on horseback without meat 
or drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white armor 
from head to foot, with the great white banner studded with 
fleur-de-lis waving over her head, she seemed "a thing 
wholly divine, whether to see or hear." The ten thousand 
men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough plunder- 
ers whose only prayer was that of La Hire, " Sire Dieu, I 
pray you to do for La Hire what La Hire would do for you 
were you captain-at-arms and he God," left off their oaths 
and foul living at her word and gathered round the altars 
on their march. Her shrewd peasant humor helped her to 
manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over 
their camp-fires at the old warrior who had been so puzzled 
by her prohibition of oaths that she suffered him still to 
swear by his Mton. In the midst of her enthusiasm her 
good sense never left her. The people crowded round her 
as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bring- 
ing crosses and chaplets to be blessed by her touch. " Touch 
them yourself," she said to an old Dame Margaret ; " your 
touch will be just as good as mine." But her faith in her 
mission remained as firm as ever. " The Maid prays and 
requires you," she wrote to Bedford, " to work no more dis- 
traction in France, but to come in her company to rescue 
the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk." — " I bring you," she 
told Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans to meet her, " the 
best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of Heaven." 

The besiegers looked on overawed as she entered Orleans, 
and, riding round the walls, bade the people look fearlessly 
on the dreaded forts which surrounded them. Her enthu- 
siasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of 
besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once 
made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the 
strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to 
adjourn the attack. " You have taken your counsel," re- 



JEANNE UARC. 183 

plied Jeanne, " and I take mine." Placing herself at the 
head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown 
open, and led them against the fort. Few as they were, the 
English fought desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen 
wounded while endeavoring to scale its walls, was borne into 
a vineyard, while Dunois sounded the retreat. "Wait a 
while ! " the girl imperiously pleaded, " eat and drink ! So 
soon as my standard touches the wall you shall enter the 
fort." It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the next 
day the siege was abandoned, and the force which had con- 
ducted it withdrew in good order to the north. 

In the midst of her triumph, Jeanne still remained the 
pure, tender-hearted peasant-girl of the Yosges. Her first 
visit as she entered Orleans was to the great church, and 
there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a passion of 
devotion that " all the people wept with her." Her tears 
burst forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the 
corpses strewed over the battle-field. She grew frightened 
at her first wound, and only threw off the touch of womanly 
fear when she heard the signal for retreat. 

Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed 
through the brutal warriors of a mediaeval camp. It was 
her care for her honor that had led her to clothe herself in 
a soldier's dress. She wept hot tears when told of the foul 
taunts of the English, and called passionately on God to wit- 
ness her chastity. " Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale," she cried 
to the English warrior whose insults had been foulest, as he 
fell wounded at her feet ; " you called me harlot ! I have 
great pity on your soul." But all thought of herself was 
lost in the thought of her mission. It was in vain that the 
French generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was 
resolute to complete her task, and, while the English re- 
mained panic-stricken around Paris, the army followed her 
from Gien through Troyes, growing in number as it ad- 
vanced, till it reached the gates of Rheims. With the coro- 
nation of Charles, the Maid felt her errand to be over. 



184 GREAT LEADERS. 

" gentle king, the pleasure of God is done ! " she cried, 
as she flung herself at the feet of Charles VII, and asked 
leave to go home. "Would it were his pleasure," she 
pleaded with the archbishop, as he forced her to remain, 
" that I might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters 
and my brothers ; they would be so glad to see me again ! " 
The policy of the French court detained her while the 
cities of the north of France opened their gates to the newly 
consecrated king. Bedford, however, who had been left 
without money or men, had now received re-enforcements, 
and Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell 
back behind the Loire, while the towns on the Oise sub- 
mitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In this later strug- 
gle Jeanne fought with her usual bravery, but with the fatal 
consciousness that her mission was at an end, and during 
the defense of Compiegne she fell into the power of the 
Bastard of Vendome, to be sold by her captor into the hands 
of the Duke of Burgundy, and by the duke into the hands 
of the English. To the English her triumphs were victories 
of sorcery, and after a year's imprisonment she was brought 
to trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court 
with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head. Throughout the 
long process which followed every art was employed to en- 
tangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the 
peasant-girl foiled the efforts of her judges. " Do you be- 
lieve," they asked, " that you are in a state of grace ? " " If 
I am not," she replied, " God will put me in it. If I am, 
God will keep me in it." Her capture, they argued, 
showed that God had forsaken her. " Since it has pleased 
God that I should be taken," she answered, meekly, " it is 
for the best." " Will you submit," they demanded, at last, 
" to the judgment of the Church militant ? " "I have come 
to the King of France," Jeanne replied, " by commission 
from God and from the Church triumphant above ; to that 
Church I submit. ... I had far rather die," she ended, pas- 
sionately, " than renounce what I have done by my Lord's 



JEANNE D'ARC. 185 

command." They deprived her of mass. " Our Lord can 
make me hear it without your aid," she said, weeping. " Do 
your voices," asked the judges, " forbid you to submit to the 
Church and the Pope ? " " Ah, no ! Our Lord first served." 
Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it is no w^onder 
that, as the long trial dragged on and question followed 
question, Jeanne's firmness wavered. On the charge of 
sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed firmly to 
God. " I hold to my Judge," she said, as her earthly judges 
gave sentence against her, "to the King of Heaven and 
Earth. God has always been my lord in all that I have 
done. The devil has never had power over me." It was 
only with a view to be delivered from the military prison 
and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she con- 
sented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared, in 
fact, among the English soldiery those outrages to her 
honor, to guard against which she had from the first as- 
sumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her 
dress was a crime, and she abandoned it ; but a renewed 
insult forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and 
the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy, which 
doomed her to death. A great pile was raised in the mar- 
ket-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the 
brutal soldiers who snatched the hated " witch " from the 
hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were 
hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed passed to 
her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and 
she clasped it to her bosom. "0 Rouen, Rouen!" she 
was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city 
from the lofty scaffold, " I have great fear lest you suffer 
for my death. . . . Yes ; my voices were of God ! " she sud- 
denly cried, as the last moment came ; " they have never 
deceived me ! " Soon the flames reached her, the girl's head 
sank on her breast, there was one cry of " Jesus ! " " We are 
lost," an English soldier muttered, as the crowd broke up ; 
" we have burned a saint ! " 



186 GREAT LEADERS, 

MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED H. 

By EDWAED gibbon. 

[Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. 
His main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his 
predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force of 
two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried the city 
of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.] 

The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our 
first attention to the person and character of the great 
destroyer. Mahomet II was the son of the second Amurath ; 
and though his mother had been decorated with the titles 
of Christian and princess, she is more probably confounded 
with the numerous concubines who peopled from every 
climate the harem of the sultan. His first education and 
sentiments were those of a devout Mussulman ; and as often 
as he conversed with an infidel, he purified his hands and 
face by the legal rites of ablution. Age and empire appear 
to have relaxed this narrow bigotry; his aspiring genius 
disdained to acknowledge a power above his own, and in his 
looser hours he presumed (it is said) to brand the Prophet of 
Mecca as a robber and impostor. Yet the sultan persevered 
in a decent reverence for the doctrine and discipline of 
the Koran. His private indiscretion must have been sacred 
from the vulgar ear, and we should suspect the credulity of 
strangers and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind 
which is hardened against truth must be armed with supe- 
rior contempt for absurdity and error. Under the tuition 
of the most skillful masters, Mahomet advanced with an 
early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge ; and, 
besides his native tongue, it is aflirmed that he spoke or 
understood five languages — the Arabic, the Persian, the 
Chaldean or Hebrew, the Latin, and the Greek. The Per- 
sian might indeed contribute to his amusement, and the 



MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II. 137 

Arabic to his edification ; and such studies are familiar to 
the Oriental youth. In the intercourse of the Greeks and 
Turks, a conqueror might wish to converse with the people 
over whom he was ambitious to reign ; his own praises in 
Latin poetry or prose might find a passage to the royal ear ; 
but what use or merit could recommend to the statesman or 
the scholar the uncouth dialect of his Hebrew slaves ? 

The history and geography of the world were familiar to 
his memory ; the lives of the heroes of the East, perhaps of 
the West, excited his emulation; his skill in astrology is 
excused by the folly of the times, and supposes some rudi- 
ments of mathematical science ; and a profane taste for the 
arts is betrayed in his liberal invitation and reward of the 
painters of Italy. But the influence of religion and learning 
was employed without effect on his savage and licentious 
nature. I will not transcribe, nor do I firmly believe, the 
stories of his fourteen pages, whose bellies were ripped open 
in search of a stolen melon, or of the beauteous slave whose 
head he severed from her body, to convince the Janizaries 
that their master was not the votary of love. His sobriety is 
attested by the silence of the Turkish annals, which accuse 
three, and three only, of the Ottoman line of the vice of 
drunkenness. 

But it can not be denied that his passions were at once 
furious and inexorable ; that in the palace, as in the field, a 
torrent of blood was spilled on the slightest provocation ; and 
that the noblest of the captive youth were often dishonored 
by his unnatural lust. In the Albanian war he studied the 
lessons, and soon surpassed the example, of his father ; and 
the conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two 
hundred cities — a vain and flattering account — is ascribed to 
his invincible sword. He was doubtless a soldier, and possi- 
bly a general. Constantinople has sealed his glory ; but if 
we compare the means, the obstacles, and the achievements, 
Mahomet II must blush to sustain a parallel with Alexander 
or Timour. Under his command, the Ottoman forces were 



188 GREAT LEADERS. 

always more numerous than their enemies ; yet their prog- 
ress was bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic, and 
his arms were checked by Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the 
Ehodian knights and by the Persian king. 

In the reign of Amurath he twice (a. d. 1451, February 9 
— A. D. 1481, July 2) tasted of royalty, and twice descended 
from the throne ; his tender age was incapable of opposing 
his father's restoration, but never could he forgive the viziers 
who had recommended that salutary measure. His nuptials 
were celebrated with the daughter of a Turkoman emir, and 
after a festival of two months he departed from Adrianople 
with his bride to reside in the government of Magnesia. 
Before the end of six weeks he was recalled by a sudden 
message from the divan, which announced the decease of 
Amurath and the mutinous spirit of the Janizaries. His 
speed and vigor commanded their obedience ; he passed the 
Hellespont with a chosen guard, and at a distance of a mile 
from Adrianople, the viziers and emirs, the imams and 
cadis, the soldiers and the people, fell prostrate before the 
new sultan. They affected to weep, they affected to rejoice. 
He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-one years, and 
removed the cause of sedition by the death, the inevitable 
death, of his infant brothers. The ambassadors of Europe 
and Asia soon appeared to congratulate his accession and 
solicit his friendship, and to all he spoke the language of 
moderation and peace. The confidence of the Greek em- 
peror was revived by the solemn oaths and fair assurances 
with which he sealed the ratification of the treaty ; and a rich 
domain on the banks of the Strymon was assigned for the 
annual payment of three hundred thousand aspers, the pen- 
sion of an Ottoman prince, who was detained at his request in 
the Byzantine court. Yet the neighbors of Mahomet might 
tremble at the severity with which a youthful monarch re- 
formed the pomp of his father's household ; the expenses of 
luxury were applied to those of ambition, and a useless train 
of seven thousand falconers was either dismissed from his 



MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II. 189 

service or enlisted in his troops. In the first summer of his 
reign he visited with an army the Asiatic provinces ; but 
after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the submission, 
of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the 
smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design. 

The Mahometan, and more especially the Turkish casu- 
ists, have pronounced that no promise can bind the faithful 
against the interest and duty of their religion, and that the 
sultan may abrogate his own treaties and those of his prede- 
cessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had 
scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the 
proudest of men, could stoop from ambition to the basest 
arts of dissimulation and deceit. Peace was on his lips, 
while war was in his heart ; he incessantly sighed for the 
possession of Constantinople ; and the Greeks, by their own 
indiscretion, afforded the first pretense of the fatal rupture. 

From the first hour of the memorable 29th of May, 
when the beleaguered city was carried by storm, disorder and 
rapine prevailed in Constantinople till the eighth hour of the 
the same day, when the sultan himself passed in triumph 
through the gate of St. Eomanus. He was attended by his 
viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of whom (says a Byzantine 
historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and 
equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals. 
The conqueror gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the 
strange though splendid appearance of the domes and 
palaces, so dissimilar from the style of Oriental architecture. 
In the hippodrome, or atmeidan^ his eye was attracted by 
the twisted column of the three serpents ; and as a trial of 
his strength he shattered with his iron mace or battle-axe 
the under jaw of one of these monsters, w^hich in the eyes 
of the Turks were the idols or talismans of the city. At 
the principal door of St. Sophia he alighted from his horse 
and entered the dome ; and such was his jealous regard for 
that monument of his glory, that on observing a zealous 
Mussulman in the act of breaking the marble pavement, he 



190 GREAT LEADERS. 

admonislied liim with his cimeter, that, if the spoil and 
captives were granted to the soldiers, the public and private 
buildings had been reserved for the prince. By his com- 
mand the metropolis of the Eastern Church was transformed 
into a mosque, the rich and portable instruments of super- 
stition had been removed ; the crosses were thrown down, 
and the walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, 
were washed and purified and restored to a state of naked 
simplicity. On the same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the 
muezzin or crier ascended the most lofty turret, and pro- 
claimed the ezan, or public invitation, in the name of God 
and his prophet. The imam preached, and Mahomet II 
performed the namaz of prayer and thanksgiving on the 
great altar where the Christian mysteries had so lately been 
celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St. Sophia 
he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a 
hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in 
a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A 
melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness 
forced itself on his mind ; and he repeated an elegant 
distich of Persian poetry : " The spider hath wove his web 
in the imperial palace ; and the owl hath sung her watch- 
song on the towers of Afrasiab." 



LOEENZO DE' MEDICI. 

By JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

[Sumamed the " Magnificent," born 1448, died 1492. The Medici 
family had in the latter part of the fourteenth century become one of 
the most influential and powerful in the Florentine Republic. It had 
amassed vast wealth in the pursuits of commerce, and spent it with the 
munificence of the most public-spirited princes. Cosmo de' Medici 
about the year 1420 became the leading man of the state, and practi- 
cally exercised control over the republic, though without definite 
authority, as ruler. The splendor of the family culminated in his 
grandson Lorenzo, who for a quarter of a century held the powers of 



LORENZO DE' MEDICI. 191 

the state in the palm of his hand, and made the city of Florence the 
most brilliant center of literature, learning, art, and refined luxury in 
Europe. Though he curtailed the liberties of the people, the city 
reached under him the highest degree of opulence and power it had ever 
attained. Eminent as statesman, poet, and scholar, the enthusiastic 
patron of authors and artists, munificent in his endowment of schools 
and libraries, he was the most favorable example of the Italian tyrants 
of the middle ages ; and his life was the source of a stream of in- 
fluences which helped to revolutionize his own age and that which 
succeeded it.] 

In" one point Lorenzo was inferior to his grandfather. 
He had no commercial talent. After suffering the banking 
business of the Medici to fall into disorder, he became virtu- 
ally bankrupt, while his personal expenditure kept con- 
tinually increasing. In order to retrieve his fortunes it was 
necessary for him to gain complete disposal of the public 
purse. This was the real object of the constitutional revo- 
lution of 1480, whereby his privy council assumed the active 
functions of the state. Had Lorenzo been as great in finance 
as in the management of men, the way might have been 
smoothed for his son Piero in the disastrous year of 1494. 

If Lorenzo neglected the pursuit of wealth, whereby 
Cosmo had raised himself from insignificance to the dicta- 
torship of Florence, he surpassed his grandfather in the use 
he made of literary patronage. It is not paradoxical to 
affirm that in his policy we can trace the subordination of a 
genuine love of art and letters to statecraft. The new cult- 
ure was one of the instruments that helped to build his 
despotism. Through his thorough and enthusiastic partici- 
pation in the intellectual interests of his age, he put him- 
self into close sympathy with the Florentines, who were 
glad to acknowledge for their leader by far the ablest of the 
men of parts in Italy. 

According as we choose our point of view, we may re- 
gard him either as a tyrant, involving his country in debt 
and dangerous wars, corrupting the morals and enfeebling the 
spirit of the people, and systematically enslaving the Athens 



192 GREAT LEADERS. 

of the modern world for the sake of founding a petty princi- 
pality ; or else as the most liberal-minded noble of his epoch, 
born to play the first part in the Florentine Eepublic, and 
careful to use his wealth and influence for the advancement 
of his fellow-citizens in culture, learning, arts, and the ameni- 
ties of life. Savonarola and the Florentine historians adopt 
the former of these two opinions. Sismondi, in his passion 
for liberty, arrays against Lorenzo the political assassinations 
he permitted, the enervation of Florence, the national debt 
incurred by the republic, and the exhausting wars with 
Sixtus carried on in his defense. 

His panegyrists, on the contrary, love to paint him as 
the pacificator of Italy, the restorer of Florentine poetry, 
the profound critic, and the generous patron. The truth 
lies in the combination of these two apparently contradictory 
judgments. Lorenzo was the representative man of his 
nation at a moment when political institutions were every- 
where inclining to despotism, and when the spiritual life of 
the Italians found its noblest expression in art and litera- 
ture. The principality of Florence was thrust upon him by 
the policy of Cosimo, by the vote of the chief citizens, and 
by the example of the sister republics, all of whom, with the 
exception of Venice, submitted to the sway of rulers. Had 
he wished, he might have found it difficult to preserve the 
commonwealth in its integrity. Few but doctrinaires be- 
lieved in a governo misto ; only aristocrats desired a governo 
stretto ; all but democrats dreaded a governo largo. And 
yet a new constitution must have been framed after one of 
these types, and the Florentines must have been educated 
to use it with discretion, before Lorenzo could have resigned 
his office of dictator with any prospect of freedom for the 
city in his charge. Such unselfish patriotism, in the face of 
such overwhelming difficulties, and in antagonism to the 
whole tendency of the age, was not to be expected from an 
oligarch of the Renaissance born in the purple, and used 
from infancy to intrigue. 



LORENZO I)E' MEDICI. 193 

Lorenzo was a man of marvelous variety and range of 
mental power. He possessed one of those rare natures 
fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sympathize with 
the most diverse forms of life. While he never for one 
moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers 
he passed for a sage, among men of letters for an original 
and graceful poet, among scholars for a Grecian sensitive to 
every nicety of Attic idiom, among artists for an amateur 
gifted with refined discernment and consummate taste. 
Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine who jousted 
with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merri- 
est, sought adventures in the streets at night, and joined 
the people in their May- day games and carnival festivities. 
The pious extolled him as an author of devotional lauds 
and mystery-plays, a profound theologian, a critic of ser- 
mons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees 
than for his pithy apothegms and maxims, as good a 
judge of cattle as of statues, as much at home in the bosom 
of his family as in the riot of an orgy, as ready to discourse 
on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot the death of a 
dangerous citizen. 

An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was the 
epitome of his nation's most distinguished qualities, that 
the versatility of the Eenaissance found in him its fullest 
incarnation. It was the duty of Italy in the fifteenth cent- 
ury not to establish religious or constitutional liberty, but 
to resuscitate culture. Before the disastrous wars of inva- 
sion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots 
as though Florence needed a Maecenas more than a Camil- 
lus. Therefore, the prince who in his own person combined 
all accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how 
to stimulate the genius of men superior to himself in special 
arts and sciences, who spent his fortune lavishly on works 
of public usefulness, whose palace formed the rallying-point 
of wit and learning, whose council-chamber was the school 
of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and 



194: GREAT LEADERS. 

every act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and gener- 
ous deeds, can not be fairly judged by an abstract standard 
of republican morality. It is nevertheless true that Lorenzo 
enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At his death he left her 
socially more dissolute, politically weaker, intellectually 
more like himself, than he found her. He had not the 
greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make 
himself the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his repub- 
lic. In other words, he was adequate, not superior to, Ke- 
naissance Italy. 

This, then, was the man round whom the greatest schol- 
ars of the third period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo, 
Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni 
Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo 
Buonarotti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of these 
names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of 
those to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo's 
villas, where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse or 
social converse, heightening the sober pleasures of Italian 
country life with all that wit and learning could produce of 
delicate and rare, have been so often sung by poets and 
celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio 
a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades 
of Academe. " In a villa overhanging the towers of Flor- 
ence," writes the austere Hallam, moved to more than usual 
eloquence in the spirit-stirring beauty of his theme, " on the 
steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, 
the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have 
envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he 
delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of 
Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an 
Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment." 
As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole or linger beneath the 
rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi's garden walls, 
once more in our imagination " the world's great age begins 
anew " ; once more the blossoms of that marvelous spring 



GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA. 195 

unclose. While tlie sun goes down beneath the mountains 
of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, and 
Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian 
stars come forth above, we remember how those mighty- 
master spirits watched the sphering of new planets in the 
spiritual skies. Savonarola in his cell below once more sits 
brooding over the servility of Florence, the corruption of a 
godless church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino 
and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in 
his memory, and with the music of Plato sounding in his 
ears, rests chin on hand and elbow upon knee, like his own 
Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof the after-fruits 
shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs. Then, 
when the strain of thought, " unsphering Plato from the 
skies," begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a 
brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden 
to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo's last made MU 
latta. 



GIEOLAMO SAYONAEOLA. 

By JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

[An Italian reformer, a member of the Dominican order of monks, 
born 1452, executed 1498. His fervid eloquence as a preacher, and his 
fierce denunciation of the vice and corruption of the Italian Renais- 
sance speedily made Savonarola a power to be reckoned with in Floren- 
tine aif airs. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the prophet's 
activity extended to political as well as religious ideals, and he 
preached an austere theocratic republic and the deposition of the Pope. 
The return of the Medici family to power was the downfall of Savona- 
rola's hopes ; and he and two of his companion reformers were stran- 
gled and their bodies burned.] 

We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some 
fading frescoes of Cozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the 
sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillows of brown stone, 
crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. 



19l6 GREAT LEADERS. 

Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a 
spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the 
scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon 
the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores 
and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the 
blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering 
cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the grass-grown streets 
of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of au- 
thentic genius kindled in Savonarola's soul. Here for the 
first time he prophesied, " The Church will be scourged, then 
regenerated, and this quickly." These are the celebrated 
three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in 
all his prophetic utterances adhered. 

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His 
voice was weak, his style uncertain ; his soul, we may believe 
still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he 
beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the 
mantle of the prophets descend upon him. Already he had 
abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had 
learned by heart each voice of the Old and New Testaments. 
Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate 
interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For 
some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found 
hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild 
and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. 
The flame which began to smolder in him at San Gemig- 
nano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savona- 
rola was now aged thirty-four. " Midway upon the path of 
life," he opened the book of Revelation ; he figured to the 
people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to de- 
nounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that 
must ensue. He pictured to them their city flowing with 
blood. His voice, which now became the interpreter of his 
soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, 
thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they be- 
lieved his prophecy ; and twenty-six years later, when the 



GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA, 197 

soldiers of Gascon de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls 
in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the apocalyp- 
tic warnings of the Dominican monk. 

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of 
prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal 
appearance and his style of preaching. We have abundant 
material for judging what his features were, and how they 
flashed beneath the storm of inspiration. Fra Bartolommeo, 
one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the charac- 
ter of St. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and 
grace of expression which his stern lineaments could as- 
sume. It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent 
within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of God. 
In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncom- 
promising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the noblest por- 
trait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now 
to be seen in the Uffizi at Florence. Of this work Michael 
Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could 
go no further. We are therefore justified in assuming that 
the engraver has not only represented fully the outline of 
Savonarola's face, but has also indicated his peculiar expres- 
sion. 

A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders. 
Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat 
flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base 
and side. From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, 
scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with 
lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, 
with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the 
stress of vehement emotion. The mouth has full, com- 
pressed, projecting lips. It is large, as if made for a torrent 
of eloquence ; it is supplied with massive muscles, as if to 
move with energy and calculated force and utterance. The 
jaw-bone is hard and heavy, the cheek-bone emergent ; be- 
tween the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the 
emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise 



198 ' GREAT LEADERS. 

of wrestling in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the 
whole, is ugly, but not repellent ; and, in spite of its great 
strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the 
faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for 
oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, 
beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to 
be found in the serener features of the classic orators. 
Savonarola was a visionary and a monk. 

The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. 
The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that 
cheek as they passed over it. The spirit of prayer quivers 
upon those eager lips. The color of Savonarola's flesh was 
brown; his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; 
like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, 
they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than 
by the evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts 
were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of ve- 
hement improvisation. From the midst of such profound 
debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit stejDS, he 
would pass suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the 
Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his dis- 
course by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon 
the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx 
of embattled arguments and pointed illustrations, pouring 
his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, ming- 
ling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings of severest 
accuracy, at one time melting his audience to tears, at 
another freezing them with terror, again quickening their 
souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in 
them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. 

His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they 
advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, 
till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered 
round him, met and attained, as it were, to single conscious- 
ness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of 
his oratory, but became the mouth-piece of God, the in- 



GIR0LA310 SAVONAROLA, 190 

terpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo^ 
never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of 
vision, he ascended the altar-steps of prophecy, and, stand- 
ing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God 
and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after 
period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church 
re-echoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing 
voice. 

The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these 
sermons at times breaks off with these words : " Here I was 
so overcome with weeping that I could not go on." Pico 
della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola's 
voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through 
all its space with people, was like a clap of doom ; a cold 
shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his 
head stood on end, as he listened. Another witness reports : " 
"These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and 
tears that every one passed through the streets without speak- 
ing, more dead than alive." 

Such was the preacher, and such was the effect of his 
oratory. The theme on which he loved to dwell was this : 
" Repent ! A Judgment of God is at hand. A sword is sus- 
pended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity — for the 
sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the world — 
for the sins of the tyrants who encourage crime and trample 
upon souls — for the sins of you people, you fathers and 
mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that 
lisp blasphemy ! " Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. 
He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare 
every abuse ; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of 
his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults ap- 
pallingly betrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered 
with particularity into the details of the coming w^oes. One 
by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the 
trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, the 
desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy. You may 



200 GREAT LEADERS. 

read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives 
of what afterward took place in the sack of Prato, in the 
storming of Brescia, in the battle of the Eonco, in the 
cavern-massacre of Vicenza. No wonder that he stirred his 
audience to their center. The hell within them was re- 
vealed. The coming down above them was made mani- 
fest. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not more prophetic. 
John crying to a generation of vipers, " Eepent ye, for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " was not more weighty 
with the mission of authentic inspiration. 

"I began," Savonarola writes himself with reference to a 
course of sermons delivered in 1491 — " I began publicly to 
expound the Eevelation in our Church of St. Mark. Dur- 
ing the course of the year I continued to develop to the 
Florentines these three propositions : That the Church 
would be renewed in our time ; that before that renovation 
God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement ; that 
these things would happen shortly." It is by right of the 
foresight of a new age, contained in these three famous so- 
called conclusions, that Savonarola deserves to be named the 
Prophet of the Eenaissance. He was no apostle of reform ; 
it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute 
the discipline or- to criticise the authority of the Church. 
He was no founder of a new order ; unlike his predecessors, 
Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a 
society of saints or preachers ; unlike his successors, Caraffe 
the Theatine, and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia 
for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for 
education. Starting with simple horror at the wickedness 
of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets. He 
steeped himself in Bible studies. He caught the language 
of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that for 
the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From 
that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief 
that a new age would dawn. The originality of his intui- 
tion consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no 



CMSAR BORGIA, 201 

man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the still- 
ness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tran- 
quillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown 
from the very nostrils of the God of hosts. 



C^SAR BORGIA. 

By CHARLES YEIAETE. 

[Son of Pope Alexander VI, at first prelate, then soldier and states- 
man, born about 1457, died 1507. All the contemporary annals con- 
cur in giving Caesar Borgia nearly every private vice, and stamp him 
as murderer, sensualist, and a man of ruthless ambition. Successively 
made bishop and cardinal in his earlier years, he was finally secular- 
ized and became Duke of Romagna and Valentinois. After having dis- 
possessed the rulers of many small principalities and united them'into 
a duchy, he is believed to have nourished the scheme of founding 
a united Italy. After some years of vicissitudes Caesar lost his political 
ascendency by the election of a pope inimical to his interests, and his 
military power by the Jealousy of the Kings of France and Spain. A 
consummate soldier and politician, he showed during the short period 
during which he exercised the functions of a ruler all the traits of a 
wise, upright, and public-spirited sovereign, in shining contrast with 
the hideous crimes which had blackened his career as a man. Csesar 
Borgia was the model on which Machiavelli drew his " Prince," in the 
celebrated politico-historical treatise of that title.] 

Was Csesar merely going straight before him, led by 
the insatiable ambition which lays hands upon all within 
its reach, or was he aiming at a distinct end, at the realiza- 
tion of a vast conception ? Granting that he had no dreams 
of reconstituting the kingdom of Central Italy himself, 
Florence at least felt herself threatened. As long ago as 
his first campaign, when, after making himself master of 
Imola and Forli, he was still besieging Cesena preparatory 
to his entry into Pesaro and his progress to Rome by way 
of Urbino, the Florentine Republic had sent Soderini on a 
mission to him, to find out his intentions and his terms. 



202 GREAT LEADERS, 

The following year, with increased anxiety, as she felt her- 
self approached more closely through the taking of Arezzo, 
which had fallen into the hands of Caesar's troops, she sent 
him Machiavelli, the most clear-sighted of her secretaries. 
The spectacle of these two champions face to face is one 
unique in history. From the day when he arrived in the 
camp, Machiavelli, who had recognized in the Duke of 
Valentinois a terrible adversary, felt that it was of vital in- 
terest to the state that he should not lose sight of him for 
a moment. As a point of fact, he never left his side up to 
the day when he saw him hunted down like a wild beast, 
vanquished by destiny, fettered beyond all power of doing 
harm to any one. 

Of course, we may refuse to accept the verdict of the 
secretary of the Florentine Eepublic. Gregorovius, the cele- 
brated author of the " History of the City of Rome in the 
Middle Ages," goes so far as to say that it is a reproach 
to the memory of the founder of political science that he 
made a blood-stained adventurer like Caesar the " Italian 
Messiah " — the precursor, in a word, of Italian unity. Again, 
P. Villari, in his fine work " N. Machiavelli e suoi tempi," 
says that the Florentine secretary, though he was an eye- 
witness of the actual deeds of Valentinois, made of him an 
imaginary personage, to whom he attributed the great ideas 
by which he himself was animated. 

Still, we have a right to point out that in history purpose 
is controlled by action. A great number of the heroic deeds 
and of the portentous decisions which have determined the 
lofty destiny of empires have not been the consequence of 
long premeditation ; they have often been the result of the 
passions and desires of mankind, or simply that of the need 
of action natural to a vigorous mind. Undoubtedly the 
immediate object of Alexander VI was the aggrandizement 
of his children, and the increase of their territory ; he cared 
only for the power of the Church insomuch as it augmented 
that of his own family, but the deeds accomplished by father 



CAESAR BORGIA. 203 

and son contributed none the less to reconstitute the tem- 
poral dominion of the Church — a work which, after its 
completion by Julius II, was destined to continue for more 
than three centuries, from 1510 to 1860. 

The ambitious Caesar himself was turning aside the cur- 
rent for his own particular advantage. When Julius II 
assumed the triple crown, the oflQcers who held the fortresses 
of Romagna with one accord refused to give them up to 
the Church, considering them as the lawful conquest and 
personal property of their leader. Machiavelli looked only 
at the results ; this is the justification of the opinion which 
he expresses concerning Valentinois in his book, " II Prin- 
cipe," in the " Legazione," the " Descrizione dei fatti di 
Romagna," and the " Decennale." He was present when 
these things were done; he calculated the effect of the 
events he witnessed. From his observation of Caesar at 
work, he noted the strength of his will and the resources of 
his mind, his strategic talents, and his administrative faculty ; 
and as within certain limits the acts of Valentinois tended 
toward a distinct goal, an ideal not unlike that at which he 
himself aimed, the Florentine secretary was not the man to 
be squeamish about ways and means. What did it matter 
to him whose hand struck at the despots of the petty prin- 
cipalities of Italy ? What cared he about the personal am- 
bition of the man who, after overthrowing them, busied 
himself at once with the organization of their states, gave 
them laws, kept them under stern discipline, and ended by 
winning the affections of the people ? 

Once the idea of union was accepted, a prince of more 
blameless . private life would succeed Caesar, and there was 
always so much progress made toward the realization of the 
great conception. The Sforza had fallen ; the princes of 
the houses of Este and Mantua were not equal to such a 
task ; Lorenzo de' Medici was no soldier. Impatient to reach 
his end, Machiavelli cast his eyes around in vain ; nowhere 
could he find a personality capable of great undertakings. 



204 GREAT LEADERS. 

Caesar alone, with his youth and daring, quick to seize an 
0]3portunity, free from scruples, imposing by his magnifi- 
cence — Caesar, who always went straight to the very core of 
a matter, a consummate soldier, full of high purposes and 
lofty schemes — seemed the one man capable of aiming at 
the goal and attaining it. From that time forward, the 
secretary made him the incarnation of his ideal prince, re- 
moving from his character the hideous elements which 
lurked beneath the fair exterior of the skillful diplomate and 
hardy soldier. 

Of these " high purposes " of which Machiavelli speaks 
we have also other proofs, without speaking of the, in a 
manner, prophetic declaration of the young cardinal who, at 
twenty, fixed his eyes on the example of the Eoman Caesar, and 
took as his motto " cum numike c^saris omen"." Some of 
the contemporaries of the Duke of Valentinois have expressed 
themselves in distinct terms regarding him. AYe have here 
some real revelations of his personal intentions which are 
free from the apres coup of the judgments pronounced by 
later historians. Speaking of the war which the Spaniards 
were carrying on to prevent the Pope from extending his 
dominions beyond the Neapolitan frontier, Signor Villari 
recognizes the fact that Alexander VI had declared his in- 
tention of making Italy " all one piece." As for C^sar, we 
read in the dispatches of Collenuccio, the ambassador of 
jFerrara, that Francesco Maria, Duke of TJrbino, had taken 
into his service a secretary who had been for some time in 
Caesar's employ, and that this person averred that he had 
heard the Duke of Eomagna say that he had " deliberately 
resolved to make himself King of Italy.'''' Here we have it 
in so many words. 

As regards Machiavelli, could we collect in one page all 
the traits of character sketched from nature, scattered here 
and there in his dispatches to the Florentine Signoria, we 
should have a literary portrait of Valentinois, signed with 
the name of the most sagacious observer that ever honored 



C^SAR BORGIA. 205 

Italian diplomacy. Caesar had never learned the art of war, 
yet it would be impossible to pass with greater facility from 
the Consistory to the camp than he did. He was no mere 
■warrior. Brave and impetuous as he was, he had more serious 
work in hand than the exchanging of sword-thrusts. He 
was at once a general, a strategist, and an administrator. 
Hardly had he taken a town when he made laws for it, and 
organized its administration ; the breaches in its fortifica- 
tions were repaired, and its defense and retention made as 
safe as if the conquest were final. No sooner had Imola, 
Forli, and Cesena fallen into his power, than he sent for 
Leonardo da Vinci to provide for a sufficient supply of 
water, to repair the fortresses, and to erect public monu- 
ments. He founded Monts cle PUU, set up courts of justice, 
and did the work of civilization everywhere. The cities 
which fell under his sway never misunderstood his efforts ; 
they looked back on the time of his supremacy with regret. 

'' This lord is ever noble and magnificent ; when his sword is in 
his hand, his courage is so great that the most arduous undertak- 
ings seem easy to hun ; in the pursuit of glory or advantage he 
shrinks from no toil or fatigue. He has the good-will of his sol- 
diers ; he has secured the best troops in Italy : it is thus that he 
makes himself formidable and victorious. Add to this, that for- 
tune is constantly favorable to him. He is of solitary habits, and 
he possesses craft, promptness, the spirit of order and good for- 
tune ; he has an extraordinary power of profiting by opportunity 
very secret (molto segreto). He controls himself with prudence ; 
{gran conoscitore delta occasione.^^) 

So Machiavelli warned the Florentines not to treat Cassar 
" like the other barons, but as a new power in Italy, with 
whom they might conclude treaties and alliances, rather 
than offer him an appointment as condottiere.'" The purely 
military element, which was Machiavelli's speciality, did 
not escape the attention of the secretary. Once he had 
found the right man, the next requisite was the proper tool 
to work with — that is, the army ; and so, when he saw these 



206 GREAT LEADERS. 

well-disciplined battalions, and the perfect order that 
eigned among them, the system of supplies secured by 
treaties, the regular equipment, and, above all, the formida- 
ble artillery, " in which department Csesar alone is as strong 
as all the sovereigns of Italy put together," the Secretary 
of the Republic recognized in Caesar a born commander, for 
whom he prophesied the most lofty career. 

Cagsar's life was very short, and the vicissitudes of his 
fortune followed each other in rapid succession. In youth 
he was a murderer, in youth a conqueror, and in youth he 
died. His period of activity as a general extended from the 
autum of 1499 to April, 1503, and his actual reign as Duke 
of Romagna lasted only two years. 

On the 26th of January, 1500, having accomplished the 
first half of his task, he entered Rome as a conqueror — on 
which occasion a representation was given of the triumph 
of Caesar with the various episodes of the life of the Roman 
Caesar shown in taUeaiix vivants^ suggested by the painter 
Mantegna. Eleven allegorical cars started from the Piazza 
Navona, Borgia himself, crowned with laurel, representing 
in his own person the conqueror of the world. Before his 
departure for his second campaign, he had, as we have al- 
ready seen, caused the assassination of Lucrezia's second 
husband, Alfonso de Bisceglie, to prepare for the third mar- 
riage of his sister, who was this time to become Duchess of 
Ferrara, and thus secure him an alliance which would for- 
ward his projects as Duke of Romagna. On the 27th of 
September, 1500, he left Rome again to complete his work, 
but returned quickly to take part in the war which the King 
of France had carried into the Neapolitan kingdom, when 
he possessed himself of the city of Capua, thus acquitting 
his obligation toward his protector, Louis XII. On the 
29th of November his father changed his title of Vicar of 
the Holy See to that of Duke of Romagna. 

The year 1503 proved an eventful one for him. No 
longer contented with his duchy, he prepared to attack Bo- 



C^SAR BORGIA. 207 

logna and to threaten Florence. The day before he set 
forth on this great undertaking, on the 5th of August, ho as- 
sisted, together with Alexander VI, at a banquet given in the 
vineyard of the Cardinal of Corneto, at the gates of Rome. 
On their return both were taken ill so suddenly that the 
cardinal was suspected of having poisoned them. The old 
man breathed his last on the 18th of August. Caesar, 
younger and more vigorous, struggled against his malady 
with extraordinary energy. He wrapped himself, as in a 
cloak, in the still quivering carcass of a newly disemboweled 
mule to overcome the shiverings brought on by fever, and 
then was thrown, still covered with blood, into a vessel of 
iced water, to bring about the reaction necessary to save his 
life. This man of iron seemed to prevail against Nature 
herself. He knew that, once his father dead and himself 
unable to move, all his enemies would rush upon him at 
once to crush him. It was the decisive moment of his life. 
He first sent his bravo, Micheletto, to seize the pontifical 
treasure, thus making sure of a sum of three hundred 
thousand ducats, the sinews of resistance. The nine thou- 
sand men-at-arms under his orders, the one disciplined force 
in the city, made him master of Eome ; the Sacred College 
set all their hopes upon this dying man, for he alone pos- 
sessed sufficient authority to prevent anarchy. 

It is a strange spectacle — the representatives of all na- 
tions accredited to the Holy See assembling at his bedside 
to negotiate with him, and Caesar, weak and helpless as he 
is, making himself responsible for the preservation of order, 
while the Sacred College formed itself into conclave to elect 
the new Pope. In order not to put any pressure upon the 
cardinals by his presence, the Duke of Yalentinois retired 
to Nepi. He left Rome, carried on the shoulders of his 
guards, livid and shivering with fever. Around his litter 
walked the ambassadors of Spain, France, and the empire, 
and mingled with the troops could be seen his mother Va- 
nozza, his brother Squillace, and his sister-in-law Sancha — 



208 GREAT LEADERS. 

all three in danger of tlieir lives in excited Eome. One of 
the Borgias had been killed, and Fabio Orsini, descendant 
of one of the Eoman barons ruined by Alexander VI, had 
steeped his hands in the detested blood, and sworn to visit 
all who bore that hated name with the same fate. 



CAKDINAL WOLSEY. 

By JOHN EICHAJRD GEEEN. 

[Thomas Wolsey, born of low origin 1471, died 1530. After a uni- 
versity education and taking priest's orders he was rapidly made pri- 
vate chaplain to Henry VII, and, on the accession of Henry VIII, he 
became the favorite of the new king, and soon afterward lord chancel- 
lor and cardinal. Wolsey's diplomatic and ministerial genius became 
one of the great powers in Europe while he managed English affairs, 
a period of about eleven years, and at home his magnificence rivaled 
that of the king himself. His fall from power grew out of his opposi- 
tion to the king's marriage with Anne Boleyn.] 

Thomas Wolsey was the son of a wealthy townsman of 
Ipswich, whose ability had raised him into notice at the 
close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken by 
Bishop Fox into the service of the crown. His extraordi- 
nary powers hardly, perhaps, required the songs, dances, 
and carouses with his indulgence in which he was taunted 
by his enemies, to aid him in winning the favor of the young 
sovereign. From the post of favorite he soon rose to that of 
minister. Henry's resentment at Ferdinand's perfidy en- 
abled Wolsey to carry out a policy which reversed that of 
his predecessors. The war had freed England from the fear 
of French pressure. Wolsey was as resolute to free her from 
the dictation of Ferdinand, and saw in a French alliance 
the best security for English independence. In 1514 a 
treaty was concluded with Louis. The same friendship 
was continued to his successor, Francis I, whose march 
across the Alps for the reconquest of Lombardy was facili- 



CARDINAL WOLSEY. 



209 



tated by Henry and Wolsey, in the hope that while the war 
lasted England would be free from all fear of attack, and 
that Francis himself might be brought to inevitable ruin. 
These hopes were defeated by his great victory at Marig- 
nano. But Francis, in the moment of triumph, saw him- 
self confronted by a new rival. Master of Castile and Ara- 
gon, of Naples and the Netherlands, the new Spanish king, 
Charles V, rose into a check on the French monarchy such 
as the policy of Henry or Wolsey had never been able to con- 
struct before. 

The alliance of England was eagerly sought by both 
sides, and the administration of Wolsey, amid all its cease- 
less diplomacy, for seven years kept England out of war. 
The peace, as we have seen, restored the hopes of the New 
Learning ; it enabled Colet to reform education, Erasmus to 
undertake the regeneration of the Church, More to set on 
foot a new science of politics. But peace, as Wolsey used 
it, was fatal to English freedom. In the political hints 
which lie scattered over the " Utopia," More notes with bit- 
ter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in 
" Nowhere " that a sovereign was " removable on suspicion 
of a design to enslave his people." In England the work of 
slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, 
through the law. " There will never be wanting some pre- 
tense for deciding in the king's favor; as that equity is on 
his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced inter- 
pretation of it ; or if none of these, that the royal preroga- 
tive ought, with conscientious judges, to outweigh all other 
considerations." 

We are startled at the precision with which More maps 
out the expedients by which the law courts were to lend 
themselves to the advance of tyranny till their crowning 
judgment in the case of ship-money. But behind these 
judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which, 
partly from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from 
the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more 



210 GREAT LEADERS, 

from the isolated position of the crown, were gradually 
winning their way in public opinion. " These notions," he 
goes boldly on, " are fostered by the maxim that the king 
can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it ; that 
not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his 
own ; and that a man has a right to no more than the king's 
goodness thinks fit not to take from him." In the hands of 
Wolsey these maxims were transformed into principles of 
state. The checks which had been imposed on the action 
of the sovereign by the presence of great prelates and nobles 
at his council were practically removed. All authority was 
concentrated in the hands of a single minister. Henry had 
munificently rewarded Wolsey's services to the crown. He 
had been promoted to the See of Lincoln and thence to the 
Archbishopric of York. Henry procured his elevation to 
the rank of cardinal, and raised him to the post of chan- 
cellor. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were 
foreigners fell into his hands ; he held the bishopric of 
Winchester and the abbacy of St. Albans ; he was in re- 
ceipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his 
official emoluments were enormous. His pomp was al- 
most royal. 

A train of prelates and nobles followed him wherever he 
moved ; his household was composed of five hundred per- 
sons of noble birth, and its chief posts were held by knights 
and barons of the realm. He spent his vast wealth with 
princely ostentation. Two of his houses — Hampton Court 
and York House, the later Whitehall — were splendid enough 
to serve at his fall as royal palaces. His school at Ipswich 
was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, 
whose name of Cardinal College has been lost in its later 
title of Christ-church. Nor was this magnificence a mere 
show of power. The whole direction of home and foreign 
affairs rested with Wolsey alone ; as chancellor he stood at 
the head of public justice; his elevation to the office of 
legate rendered him supreme in the Church. Enormous as 



FRANCISCO PIZARRO. 211 

was the mass of work whicli he undertook, it was thoroughly 
done ; his administration of the royal treasury was econom- 
ical ; the number of his dispatches is hardly less remarkable 
than the care bestowed upon each ; even More, an avowed 
enemy, confesses that as chancellor he surpassed all men's 
expectations. The court of chancery, indeed, became so 
crowded through the character of expedition and justice 
which it gained under his rule that subordinate courts had 
to be created for its relief. It was this concentration of all 
secular and ecclesiastical power in a single hand which ac- 
customed England to the personal government which began 
with Henry VIII ; and it was, above all, Wolsey's long 
tenure of the whole Papal authority within the realm, and 
the consequent suspension of appeals to Eome, that led men 
to acquiesce at a later time in Henry's claim of religious su- 
premacy ; for, proud as was Wolsey's bearing and high as 
were his natural powers, he stood before England as the 
mere creature of the king. Greatness, wealth, authority he 
held, and owned he held, simply at the royal will. In rais- 
ing his low-born favorite to the head of Church and state, 
Henry was gathering all religious as well as all civil author- 
ity into his personal grasp. The nation which trembled 
before Wolsey learned to tremble before the king who could 
destroy Wolsey by a breath. 



FRANCISCO PIZAEEO. 

By WILLIAM HICKLING PEESCOTT. 

[One of the Spanish conquerors of America, born about 1471, died 
1541. The illegitimate son of a Spanish general, his childhood was 
spent in a peasant's hut. Going as an adventurer to the New World, 
he took part in several important expeditions, among them Balboa's 
settlement of Darien. In 1524, Pizarro, with a brother adventurer, 
Almagro, in an attempt on New Grenada, got intelligence of the great 
Peruvian empire of the Incas. It was not till 1531 that Pizarro, hav- 



212 GREAT LEADERS. 

ing secured full commission and extraordinary concessions from 
Charles V., was able to raise a force of two hundred and fifty men to 
attempt the conquest, which was brilliantly successful. He reigned 
as vi-ceroy, and was finally assassinated by a son of his old comrade 
Almagro, whom he had put to death.] 

PiZARRO was tall in stature, well-proportioned, and with 
a countenance not unpleasing. Bred in camps, with noth- 
ing of the polish of a court, he had a soldier-like bearing, 
and the air of one accustomed to command. But, though 
not polished, there was no embarrassment or rusticity in his 
address, which, where it served his purpose, could be plaus- 
ible and even insinuating. The proof of it is the favorable 
impression made by him, on presenting himself, after his 
second expedition — stranger as he was to all its forms and 
usages — at the punctilious court of Castile. 

Unlike many of his countrymen, he had no passion for 
ostentatious dress, which he regarded as an incumbrance. 
The costume which he most affected on public occasions 
was a black cloak, with a white hat, and shoes of the same 
color ; the last, it is said, being in imitation of the Great 
Captain, whose character he had early learned to admire in 
Italy, but to which his own, certainly, bore very faint re- 
semblance. 

He was temperate in eating, drank sparingly, and usually 
rose an hour before dawn. He was punctual in attendance 
to business, and shrank from no toil. He had, indeed, 
great powers of patient endurance. Like most of his nation, 
he was fond of play, and cared little for the quality of those 
with whom he played ; though, when his antagonist could 
not afford to lose, he would allow himself, it is said, to be 
the loser — a mode of conferring an obligation much com- 
mended by a Castilian writer for its delicacy. 

Though avaricious, it was in order to spend, and not to 
hoard. His ample treasure, more ample than those, proba- 
bly, that ever before fell to the lot of an adventurer, were 
mostly dissipated in his enterprises, his architectural works, 



FRANCISCO PIZARRO. 215 

and schemes of public improvement, whicli, in a cou.con- 
wliere gold and silver might be said to have lost their valud 
from their abundance, absorbed an incredible amount of 
money. While he regarded the whole country, in a manner, 
as his own, and distributed it freely among his captains, it 
is certain that the princely grant of territory, with twenty 
thousand vassals, made to him by the Crown, was never 
carried into etfect ; nor did his heirs ever reap the benefit 
of it. 

Though bold in action and not easily turned from his 
purpose, Pizarro was slow in arriving at a decision. This 
gave him an appearance of irresolution foreign to his char- 
acter. Perhaps the consciousness of this led him to adopt 
the custom of saying " No," at first, to applicants for favor ; 
and afterward, at leisure, to revise his judgment, and grant 
what seemed to him expedient. He took the opjoosite course 
from his comrade Almagro, who, it was observed, generally 
said " Yes," but too often failed to keep his promise. This 
was characteristic of the careless and easy nature of the 
latter, governed by impulse rather than principle. 

It is hardly necessary to speak of the courage of a man 
pledged to such a career as that of Pizarro. Courage, in- 
deed, was a cheap quality among the Spanish adventurers, 
for danger was their element. But he possessed something 
higher than mere animal courage, in that constancy of pur- 
pose which was rooted too deeply in his nature to be shaken 
by the wildest storms of fortune. It was this inflexible con- 
stancy which formed the key to his character, and consti- 
tuted the secret of his success. A remarkable evidence of it 
was given in his first expedition, among the mangroves and 
dreary marshes of Choco. He saw his followers pining 
around him under the blighting malaria, wasting before an 
invisible enemy, and unable to strike a stroke in their own 
defense. Yet his spirit did not yield, nor did he falter in 
his enterprise. 

There is something oppressive to the imagination in this 



GREAl LEADERS. 

cigainst nature. In the struggle of man against man, 
^ne spirits are raised by a contest conducted on equal terms ; 
but in a war with the elements we feel that, however bravely 
we may contend, we can have no power to control. JSTor are 
we cheered on by the prospect of glory in such a contest ; 
for, in the capricious estimate of human glory, the silent 
endurance of privations, however painful, is little, in com- 
parison with the ostentatious trophies of victory. The laurel 
of the hero — alas for humanity that it should be so ! — 
grows best on the battle-field. 

This inflexible spirit of Pizarro was shown still more 
strongly when, in the little island of Gallo, he drew the line 
on the sand which was to separate him and his handful of 
followers from their country and from civilized man. He 
trusted that his own constancy would give strength to the 
feeble, and rally brave hearts around him for the prosecu- 
tion of his enterprise. He looked with confidence to the 
future, and he did not miscalculate. This was heroic, and 
wanted only a nobler motive for its object to constitute the 
true moral sublime. 

Yet the same feature in his character was displayed in a 
manner scarcely less remarkable when, landing on the coast, 
and ascertaining the real strength and civilization of the 
Incas, he persisted in marching into the interior at the head 
of a force of less than two hundred men. In this he un- 
doubtedly proposed to himself the example of Cortes, so 
contagious to the adventurous spirits of that day, and 
especially to Pizarro, engaged as he was in a similar enter- 
prise. Yet the hazard assumed by Pizarro was far greater 
than that of the conqueror of Mexico, whose force was 
nearly three times as large, while the terrors of the Inca 
name — however justified by the result — were as widely 
spread as those of the Aztecs. 

It was, doubtless, in imitation of the same captivating 
model that Pizarro planned the seizure of Atahualpa. But 
the situations of the two Spanish captains were as dissimilar 



FRANCISCO PIZARRO. 215 

as the manner in which their acts of violence were con- 
ducted. The wanton massacre of the Peruvians resembled 
that perpetrated by Alvarado in Mexico, and might have 
been attended with consequences as disastrous if the Peru- 
vian character had been as fierce as that of the Aztecs. 
But the blow which roused the latter to madness broke the 
tamer spirits of the Peruvians. It was a bold stroke, which 
left so much to chance that it scarcely merited the name of 
policy. 

When Pizarro landed in the country, he found it dis- 
tracted by a contest for the crown. It would seem to have 
been for his interest to play off one party against the other, 
throwing his own weight into the scale that suited him. 
Instead of this, he resorted to an act of audacious violence 
which crushed them both at a blow. His subsequent career 
afforded no scope for the profound policy displayed by 
Cortes, when he gathered conflicting nations under his ban- 
ner and directed them against a common foe. Still less did 
he have the opportunity of displaying the tactics and admi- 
rable strategy of his rival. Cortes conducted his military 
operations on the scientific principles of a great captain at 
the head of a powerful host. Pizarro appears only as an 
adventurer, a fortunate knight-errant. By one bold stroke 
he broke the spell which had so long held the land under 
the dominion of the Incas. The spell was broken, and the 
airy fabric of their empire, built on the superstition of ages, 
vanished at a touch. This was good fortune, rather than the 
result of policy. 

But, as no picture is without its lights, we must not, in 
justice to Pizarro, dwell exclusively on the darker features 
of his portrait. There was no one of her sons to whom 
Spain was under larger obligations for extent of empire, 
for his hand won for her the richest of the Indian jewels 
that once sparkled in her imperial diadem. When we con- 
template the perils he braved, the sufferings he patiently 
endured, the incredible obstacles he overcame, the magnifi- 



216 GREAT LEADERS. 

cent results he effected with his single arm, as it were, un- 
aided by the government — though neither a good nor a great 
man, in the highest sense of that term— it is impossible not 
to regard him as a very extraordinary one. 



HERNANDO CORTES. 

By WILLIAM HICKLING PEESCOTT. 

[The Spanish conqueror of Mexico, born 1485, died 1547. Born of 
a noble race, he was educated at the University of Salamanca, but soon 
devoted his attention to arms. He turned his eyes to America in 1504, 
and sailing thither, held various minor offices of trust, civic and mili- 
tary, till the discovery of Mexico. Cortes was appointed by Velasquez, 
the governor-general, to the command of the new expedition designed 
for Mexico in 1518. Though afterward superseded by his jealous su- 
perior, he succeeded in evading the enforcement of the decree, and 
landed at Tabasco, Mexico, on March 4, 1519. He burned his ships 
and committed himself to success or death. His army contained only 
five hundred and fifty Spaniards, but with these, and the native allies 
whom he seduced by his arts, he conquered the Mexican Empire in 
little more than two years. Though he was rewarded with titles and 
wealth, he was ungratefully treated by the king— a common fate of the 
great servants of Spain — and died in retirement, out of court favor.] 

CoKTES, at the time of the Mexican Conquest, was thir- 
ty-three or thirty-four years of age. In stature he was 
rather above the middle size. His countenance was pale, 
and his large dark eye gave an expression of gravity to his 
countenance not to have been expected in one of his cheer- 
ful temperament. His figure was slender, at least till later 
life ; but his chest was deep, his shoulders broad, his frame 
muscular and well proportioned. It presented the union of 
agility and vigor which qualified him to excel in fencing, 
horsemanship, and the other general exercises of chivalry. 
In his diet he was temperate, careless of what he ate, and 
drinking little ; while to toil and privation he seemed per- 
fectly indifferent. His dress — for he did not disdain the im- 



HERNANDO COETJ^S. 217 

pression produced by such adventitious aids — was such as to 
set off his handsome figure to advantage, neither gaudy, nor 
striking, nor rich. He wore few ornaments, and usually the 
same, but those were of a great price. His manners, frank 
and soldier-like, concealed a most cool and calculating spirit. 
With his gayest humor there mingled a settled air of resolu- 
tion which made those who approached him feel that they 
must obey ; and which infused something like awe into the 
attachment of his most devoted followers. Such a combina- 
tion, in which love was tempered by authority, was the one 
probably best calculated to inspire devotion in the rough 
and turbulent spirits among whom his lot was to be cast. 

The history of the Conquest is necessarily that of Cortes, 
who is, if I may so say, not merely the soul but the body of 
the enterprise ; present everywhere in person, out in the 
thick of the fight, or in the building of the works, with his 
sword or with his musket, sometimes leading his soldiers, 
and sometimes directing his little navy. The negotiations, 
intrigues, correspondence, are all conducted by him ; and, 
like Caesar, he wrote his own Commentaries in the heat of 
the^ stirring scenes which form the subject of them. His 
character is marked with the most opposite traits, embrac- 
ing qualities apparently the most incompatible. He was 
avaricious, yet liberal ; bold to desperation, yet cautious and 
calculating in his plans ; magnanimous, yet very cunning ; 
courteous and affable in his deportment, yet inexorably 
stern ; lax in his notions of morality, yet (not uncommon) a 
sad bigot. 

The great feature in his character was constancy of pur- 
pose ; a constancy not to be daunted by danger, nor baffled 
by disappointment, nor wearied out by impediments and 
delays. 

He was a knight-errant in the literal sense of the word. 

Of all the band of adventurous cavaliers whom Spain, in the 

sixteenth century, sent forth on the career of discovery and 

conquest, there was none more deeply filled with the spirit 

10 



218 GREAT LEADERS, 

of romantic enterprise than Hernando Cortes. Dangers and 
difficulties, instead of deterring, seemed to have a charm in 
his eyes. They were necessary to rouse him to a full con- 
sciousness of his powers. He grappled with them at the 
outset, and, if I may so express myself, seemed to prefer to 
take his enterprises by the most difficult side. He con- 
ceived, at the first moment of his landing in Mexico, the de- 
sign of its conquest. When he saw the strength of its civili- 
zation, he was not turned from his purpose. When he was 
assailed by the superior force of Narvaez, he still persisted 
in it ; and when he was driven in ruin from the capital, he 
still cherished his original idea. How successfully he car- 
ried it into execution, we have seen. After the few years of 
repose which succeeded the Conquest, his adventurous spirit 
impelled him to that dreary march across the marshes of 
Chiapa ; and, after another interval, to seek his fortunes on 
the stormy Californian gulf. When he found that no other 
continent remained for him to conquer, he made serious 
proposals to the emperor to equip a fleet at his own expense, 
with which he would sail to the Moluccas, and subdue the 
Spice Islands for the crown of Castile ! 

This spirit of knight-errantry might lead us to under- 
value his talents as a general, and to regard him merely in 
the light of a lucky adventurer. But this would be doing 
him injustice ; for Cortes was certainly a great general, if 
that man be one who performs great achievements with the 
resources which his own genius has created. There is prob- 
ably no instance in history where so vast an enterprise has 
been achieved by means apparently so inadequate. He may 
be truly said to have effected the conquest by his own re- 
sources. If he was indebted for his success to the co-opera- 
tion of the Indian tribes, it was the force of his genius that 
obtained command of such materials. He arrested the arm 
that was lifted to smite him, and made it do battle in his 
behalf. He beat the Tlascalans, and made them his stanch 
allies. He beat the soldiers of Narvaez, and doubled his 



HERNANDO CORTES. 219 

effective force by it. When his own men deserted him he 
did not desert himself. He drew them back by degrees, and 
compelled them to act by his will till they were all as one 
man. He brought together the most miscellaneous collec- 
tion of mercenaries who ever fought under one standard — 
adventurers from Cuba and the isles, craving for gold ; 
hidalgos, who came from the old country to win laurels ; 
broken-down cavaliers, who hoped to mend their fortunes 
in the New World ; vagabonds flying from justice ; the grasp- 
ing followers of Narvaez, and his own reckless veterans — 
men with hardly a common tie, and burning with the spirit 
of jealousy and faction ; wild tribes of the natives from all 
parts of the country, who had been sworn enemies from 
their cradles, and who had met only to cut one another's 
throats and to procure victims for sacrifice ; men, in short, 
differing in race, in language, and in interests, with scarcely 
anything in common among them. Yet this motley con- 
gregation was assembled in one camp, compelled to bend 
to the will of one man, to consort together in harmony, to 
breathe, as it were, one spirit, and to move on a common 
principle of action ! It is in this wonderful power over the 
discordant masses thus gathered under his banner that we 
recognize the genius of the great commander no less than in 
the skill of his military operations. 

His power over the minds of his soldiers was a natural 
result of their confidence in his abilities. But it is also to 
be attributed to his popular manners — that happy union of 
authority and companionship which fitted him for the com- 
mand of a band of roving adventurers. It would not have 
done for him to have fenced himself round with the stately 
reserve of a commander of regular forces. He was embarked 
with his men in a common adventure, and nearly on terms 
of equality, since he held his commission by no legal war- 
rant. But while he indulged this freedom and familiarity 
with his soldiers, he never allowed it to interfere with their 
strict obedience, nor to impair the severity of discipline. 



220 GREAT LEADERS. 

When he had risen to higher consideration, although he 
affected more state, he still admitted his veterans to the 
same intimacy. " He preferred," says Diaz, " to be called 
' Cortes ' by us, to being called by any title ; and with good rea- 
son," continues the enthusiastic old cavalier, " for the name 
of Cortes is as famous in our day as was that of Caesar among 
the Komans, or of Hannibal among the Carthaginians." He 
showed the same kind regard toward his ancient comrades 
in the very last act of his life ; for he appropriated a sum 
by his will for the celebration of two thousand masses for 
the souls of those who had fought with him in the cam- 
paigns of Mexico. 

His character has been unconsciously traced by the hand 
of a master — 

' ' And oft the chieftain deigned to aid 
And mingle in the mirth they made ; 
For though, with men of high degree, 
The proudest of the proud was he. 
Yet, trained in camps, he knew the art 
To win the soldier's hardy heart. 
They love a captain to obey. 
Boisterous as March, yet fresh as May ; 
With open hand, and brow as free, 
Lover of wine and minstrelsy ; 
Ever the first to scale a tower. 
As venturous in a lady's bower ; 
Such buxom chief shall lead his host 
From India's fires to Zembla's frost." 

Cortes, without much violence, might have sat for this 
portrait of Marmion. 

Cortes was not a vulgar conqueror. He did not conquer 
from the mere ambition of conquest. If he destroyed the 
ancient capital of the Aztecs, it was to build up a more 
magnificent capital on its ruins. If he desolated the land 
and broke up its existing institutions, he employed the short 
period of his administration in digesting schemes for intro- 



HERNANDO CORTES. 221 

ducing there a more improved culture and a higher civiliza- 
tion. In all his expeditions he was careful to study the 
resources of the country, its social organization, and its 
physical capacities. He enjoined it on his captains to at- 
tend particularly to these objects. If he was greedy of gold, 
like most of the Spanish cavaliers in the New AVorld, it was 
not to hoard it, nor merely to lavish it in the support of a 
princely establishment, but to secure funds for prosecuting 
his glorious discoveries. Witness his costly expeditions to 
the Gulf of California. 

His enterprises were not undertaken solely for mercenary 
objects, as is shown by the various expeditions he set on 
foot for the discovery of a communication between the At- 
lantic and the Pacific. In his schemes of ambition he 
showed a respect for the interests of science, to be referred 
partly to the natural superiority of his mind, but partly, 
no doubt, to the influence of early education. It is, indeed, 
hardly possible that a person of his wayward and mercurial 
temper should have improved his advantages at the univer- 
sity, but he brought away from it a tincture of scholarship 
seldom found among the cavaliers of the period, and which 
had its influence in enlarging his own conceptions. His 
celebrated letters are written with a simple elegance that, 
as I have already had occasion to remark, have caused them 
to be compared to the military narrative of Caesar. It will 
not be easy to find in the chronicles of the period a more 
concise yet comprehensive statement, not only of the events 
of his campaigns, but of the circumstances most worthy of 
notice in the character of the conquered countries. 

Cortes was not cruel; at least, not cruel as compared 
with most of those who followed his iron trade. The path 
of the conqueror is necessarily marked with blood. He was 
not too scrupulous, indeed, in the execution of his plans. He 
swept away the obstacles which lay in his track ; and his 
fame is darkened by the commission of more than one act 
which his boldest apologist will find it hard to vindicate. 



222 GREAT LEADERS. 

But he was not cruel. He allowed no outrage on his unre- 
sisting foes. This may seem small praise, but it is an excep- 
tion to the usual conduct of his countrymen in their con- 
quests, and it is something, to be in advance of one's time. 
He was severe, it may be added, in enforcing obedience to 
his orders for protecting their persons and their property. 
With his licentious crew, it was sometimes not without 
hazard that he was so. After the Conquest, he sanctioned 
the system of repartimieyitos ; but so did Columbus. He 
endeavored to regulate it by the most humane laws, and 
continued to suggest many important changes for amelio- 
rating the condition of the natives. The best commentary 
on his conduct, in this respect, is the deference that was 
shown him by the Indians, and the confidence with which 
they appealed to him for protection in all their subsequent 
distresses. 

MAETIN LUTHER 

By THOMAS CAELYLE. 

[Leader of the German Keformation, born 1483, died 1546. Edu- 
cated at the University of Erfurt, and originally intending to become 
a lawyer, he was carried by religious enthusiasm into an Augustinian 
convent. After taking orders he became in a few years Professor of 
Philosophy in the Wittenberg University, and Doctor of Theology. It 
was not till the promulgation of indulgences for sin, issued by Pope 
Leo V to raise funds for the building of the Cathedral of St. Peter's 
at Rome, that Luther took a stand antagonistic to the Eoman Church. 
He posted ninety-five Latin theses on the door of the Wittenberg 
church as a protest, which contained the germ of the Protestant 
doctrine. This bold act kindled a fire throughout Europe. Luther's 
celebrated disputation with Doctor Eck, and his fierce pamphlets 
against Rome, which were scattered broadcast by the press, added fuel 
to the flames, and he was soon supported by the sympathy and adher- 
ence of many of the nobles, particularly George of Saxony, the re- 
former's own electoral prince, as well as by the support of large masses 
of the people. Luther was excommunicated in 1520, and in the same 
year was summoned to answer before Charles V, the German emperor, 




MARTIN LUTHER. 



MARTIN LUTHER. 223 

at the Diet of Worms. The reformer defended himself with great 
eloquence and vigor, but was placed under the ban of the Empire, and 
thenceforward became both a religious and political outlaw. The 
Lutheran reformation rapidly spread to France, Switzerland, the 
Scandinavian kingdoms, England, and Scotland, during the life of its 
apostle, and shook the power of the Roman hierarchy to its very 
center. Luther was protected in his work by a powerful band of Ger- 
man princes, and when he died the larger part of North Germany had 
accepted his doctrine. He was perhaps the most extraordinary figure 
of an age prolific in great men.] 

The Diet of Worms and Luther's appearance there on 
the 17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest 
scene in modern European history ; the point, indeed, from 
which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its 
rise. After multiplied negotiations and disputations, it had 
come to this. The young Emperor Charles V, with all the 
princes of Germany, papal nuncios, dignitaries, spiritual and 
temporal, are assembled there : Luther is to appear and 
answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The 
world's pomp and power sits there on this hand ; on that, 
stands up for God's truth one man, the poor miner, Hans 
Luther's son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised 
him not to go ; he would not be advised. A large company 
of friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest 
warnings; he answered, "Were there as many devils in 
Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on." The people, on 
the morrow, as he went to the hall of the diet, crowded 
the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to 
him, in solemn words, not to recant. " Whosoever denieth 
me before men ! " they cried to him, as in a kind of solemn 
petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality a petition 
too — the petition of the whole world lying in dark bondage 
of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral nightmare and 
triple-hatted chimera, calling itself Father in God, and 
what not — " Free us ; it rests with thee ; desert us not ! " 

Luther did not desert us. His speech of two hours dis- 
tinguished itself by its respectful, wise, and honest tone; 



224 GREAT LEADERS. 

submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, 
not submissive to any more than that. His writings, he 
said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of 
God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered 
into it ; unguarded anger, blindness, many things, doubtless, 
which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. 
But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, 
he could not recant it. How could he ? " Confute me," he 
concluded, " by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain, just 
arguments. I can not recant otherwise ; for it is neither 
safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here 
stand I ; I can do no other. God assist me ! " It is, as we 
say, the greatest moment in the modern history of men. 
English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, 
and the vast work done in these two centuries; French 
Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present — the 
germ of it all lay there. Had Luther in that moment done 
other, it had all been otherwise ! The European world was 
asking him : Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stag- 
nant putrescence, loathsome, accursed death ; or, with what 
paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured 
and live ? 

Great wars, contentions, and disunion followed out of 
this Reformation, which last down to our day, and are yet 
far from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made 
about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but, after 
all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It 
seems strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all 
this. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King 
Augeas's stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted 
was considerable all around, but I think it was not Hercu- 
les's blame ; it was some other's blame ! The Reformation 
might bring what results it liked when it came, but the 
Reformation simply could not help coming. 

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars 
and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began 



MARTIN LUTHER. 225 

SO long as he continued living. The controversy did not 
get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is a proof 
of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we 
find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, who 
does not himself perish, swept away in it ! Such is the usual 
course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good de- 
gree, sovereign of this greatest revolution ; all Protestants, of 
what rank or function soever, looking much to him for 
guidance ; and he held it peaceably, continued firm at the 
center of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty ; 
he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true 
-heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously 
on that, as a strong, true man, that other true men may rally 
round him there. He will not continue leader of men other- 
wise. Luther's clear, deep force of judgment, his force of 
all sorts — of silence, of tolerance and moderation among 
others — are very notable in these circumstances. 

Tolerance, I say ; a very genuine kind of tolerance : he 
distinguishes what is essential, and what is not ; the unes- 
sential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes to 
him that such and such a reformed preacher "will not 
preach without a cassock." " Well," answers Luther, " what 
harm will a cassock do the man ? Let him have a cassock 
to preach in ; let him have three cassocks, if he find benefit 
in them ! " His conduct in the matter of Carlstadt's wild 
image-breaking ; of the Anabaptists ; of the Peasants' war, 
shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic vio- 
lence. With sure, prompt insight, he discriminates what is 
what ; a strong, just man, he speaks forth what is the wise 
course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's written 
works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these 
speculations is now grown obsolete for us, but one still 
reads them with a singular attraction. And, indeed, the 
mere grammatical diction is still legible enough. Luther's 
merit in literary history is of the greatest ; his dialect be- 
came the language of all writing. They are not well writ- 



226 GREAT LEADERS. 

ten, these four-and-twenty quartos of his ; written hastily, 
with quite other than literary objects. But in no books 
have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble, faculty 
of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, 
simplicity; a rugged, sterling sense and strength. He 
flashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic 
phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. 
Good humor too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth. 
This man could have been a poet too ! He had to icorh an 
epic poem, and not write one. I call him a great thinker; 
as, indeed, his greatness of heart already betokens that. 

Richter says of Luther's words, "His words are half- 
battles." They may be called so. The essential quality of 
him was, that he could fight and conquer — that he was a right 
piece of human valor. No more valiant man, no mortal 
heart to be called traver^ that one has record of, ever lived 
in that Teutonic kindred whose character is valor. His 
defiance of the " devils " in Worms was not a mere boast, as 
the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's 
that there were devils, spiritual denizens of the pit, con- 
tinually besetting men. Many times in his writings this 
turns up, and a most small sneer has been grounded on it 
by some. 

In the room of the W^artburg, where he sat translating 
the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall, the 
strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther was 
translating one of the Psalms ; he was worn down with 
long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food ; there rose 
before him some hideous, indefinable image, which he took 
for the Evil One, to forbid his work. Luther started up with 
fiend-defiance, flung his inkstand at the specter, and it dis- 
appeared! The spot still remains there, a curious monu- 
ment of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can 
now tell us what we are to think of this apparition in a 
scientific sense ; but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, 
face to face, against hell itself, can give no higher proof of 



MARXm LUTHER. 227 

fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on 
this earth or under it. Fearless enough ! " The devil is 
aware," writes he on one occasion, " that this does not pro- 
ceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable 
devils." Of Duke George, of Leipsic, a great enemy of 
his, he said, " Duke George is not equal to one devil — far 
short of a devil ! If I had business at Leipsic, I would ride 
into Leipsic, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days 
running." What a reservoir of dukes to ride into ! 

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this 
man's courage was ferocity — mere coarse, disobedient obsti- 
nacy and savagery — as many do. Far from that. There 
may be an absence of fear, which arises from the absence of 
thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid 
fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly. 
With Luther it was far otherwise ; no accusation could be 
more unjust than this mere ferocious violence brought 
against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and 
love, as, indeed, the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger 
before a stronger foe flies. The tiger is not what we call 
valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more 
touching than those soft breathings of affection — soft as a 
child's or a mother's — in this great, wild heart of Luther. So 
honest, unadulterated with any cant ; homely, rude in their 
utterance ; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in 
fact, was all this downpressed mood of despair and reproba- 
tion which we saw in his youth but the outcome of pre- 
eminent, thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and 
pure? It is the curse such men as the poor poet Cowper 
fall into. Luther, to a slight observer, might have seemed 
a timid, weak man ; modesty, affectionate, shrinking tender- 
ness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which 
is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, 
all kindled into a heavenly blaze. 

In Luther's " Table-Talk," a posthumous book of anec- 
dotes and sayings collected by his friends — the most inter- 



228 GREAT LEADERS. 

esting now of all the books proceeding from him — we have 
many beautiful, unconscious displays of the man and what 
sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his 
little daughter — so still, so great and loving — is among the 
most affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magda- 
lene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live 
— follows, in awe-struck thought, the flight of her little 
soul through those unknown realms. Awestruck — most 
heartfelt, we can see ; and sincere — for, after all dogmatic 
creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know 
or can know. His little Magdalene shall be with God, as 
God wills ; for Luther, too, that is all. 

Once he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the castle of 
Coburg, in the middle of the night. The great vault of 
immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it — dumb, 
gaunt, huge — who supports all that ? " None ever saw the 
pillars of it ; yet it is supported." God supports it. We 
must know that God is great, that God is good ; and trust, 
where we can not see. Returning home from Leipsic once, 
he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields. How it 
stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its 
golden head bent, all rich and waving there; the meek 
earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again — 
the bread of man ! In the garden of Wittenberg, one even- 
ing at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night. That 
little bird, says Luther; above it are the stars and deep 
heaven of worlds ; yet it has folded its little wings ; gone 
trustfully to rest there as in its home. The maker of it 
has given it, too, a home ! Neither are mirthful turns 
wanting — there is a gre^t, free, human heart in this 
man. 

The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness; 
idiomatic, expressive, genuine ; gleams here and there with 
beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother 
man. His love of music, indeed — is not this, as it were, the 
summary of all these affections in him ? Many a wild un- 



MARTIN LUTHER. 229 

utterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. 
The devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on 
the one hand, and such love of music on the other — I could 
call these the two opposite poles of a great soul ; between 
these two all great things had room. 

Luther's face is to me expressive of him. In Kranach's 
best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face, 
with its huge, crag-like brows and bones — the emblem of 
rugged energy — at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the 
eyes especially there is a wild, silent sorrow ; an unnamable 
melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections ; 
giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter 
was in this Luther, as w^e said ; but tears also were there. 
Tears also were appointed him ; tears and hard toil. The 
basis of his life was sadness, earnestness. In his latter days, 
after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself heart- 
ily weary of living. He considers that God alone can and 
will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps 
the day of judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for 
one thing — that God w^ould release him from his labor, and 
let him depart and be at rest. They understood little of 
the man who cite this in discredit of him ! I will call this 
Luther a true great man; great in intellect, in courage, 
affection, and integrity ; one of our most lovable and precious 
men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine 
mountain ; so simple, honest, spontaneous ; not setting up 
to be great at all ; there for quite another purpose than 
being great ! Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and 
wide into the heavens ; yet, in the clefts of its fountains, 
green, beautiful valleys with flowers ! A right spiritual hero 
and prophet ; once more, a true son of nature and fact, for 
whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will 
be thankful to Heaven. 



230 GREAT LEADERS. 



IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA (SAINT), 
FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF JESUS. 

By Sir JAMES STEPHEN. 

[Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde de Loyola, born in 1491, died in 1556. 
The scion of one of the noblest families in Spain, he was courtier and 
soldier till he was severely wounded in defending the city of Pampe- 
luna against the French. A prisoner and a cripple, he became a relig- 
ious enthusiast and ascetic, and conceived the idea of forming a body 
of religious soldiery for the defense of the Roman hierarchy against 
the assaults of its foes. After studying for the priesthood and taking 
orders, he went to Rome and with some difficulty persuaded the pontiff 
Paul III, who dreaded the fanatical discipline of such an order as 
much as he recognized its value, to issue a bull in sanction of his plan. 
The Society of Jesus was thus organized, and soon became, as it has 
continued to be, the most powerful bulwark of Romanism, the most 
active center of aggression and propagandism. The foundation of 
this order is recognized by historians as an epoch in the history of re- 
ligion.] 

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in 
his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and, if not a poet, 
at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna 
his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar 
leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of 
apostles. Yet St. Peter's therapeutic skill was less perfect 
than might have been expected from so exalted a chirur- 
geon ; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and 
the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair pro- 
portions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched upon the 
rack ; and expiated by a long confinement to his couch this 
singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sin- 
ews. Books of knighthood relieved the lassitude of sick- 
ness, and when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a 
series of still more marvelous romances. In the legends of 
the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of emu- 




LOYOLA. 



IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA {SAINT). 231 

lation and glory. Compared with their self-conquests and 
hio-h rewards, the achievements and the renown of Eoland 
and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless 
damsel for whose smiles Palladius had fought and died, how 
transcendently glorious the image of female loveliness and 
angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit's cell and 
the path of the way-worn pilgrims I 

Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the 
plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin Mother beyond 
the noblest devotion of merely human chivalry. In her 
service he would cast his shield over the Church which as- 
cribed to her more than celestial dignities, and bathe in the 
blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean 
ends of worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded 
by her to whom they were addressed. Environed in light, 
and clasping her infant to her bosom, she revealed herself to 
the adoring gaze of her champion. At that heavenly vision 
all fantasies of worldly and sensual delight, like exorcised 
demons, fled from his soul into eternal exile. He rose, sus- 
pended at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there 
his nocturnal devotions, and with returning day retired to 
consecrate his future life to the glory of the Virgo Deipara. 

To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities ; convul- 
sive agonies of prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted 
bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he 
lined his gabardine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge 
of starvation, assumed the demeanor of an idiot, became too 
loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a 
gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings 
with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and 
despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had 
nearly given way. 

At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble 
intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempest in 
which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be ac- 
complished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps 



232 GREAT LEADERS, 

of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady, 
when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the 
worshiper. That ineffable mystery which the author of the 
Athanasian creed has labored in vain to enunciate in words, 
was disclosed to him as an object, not of faith, but of actual 
sight. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual 
process by Avhicli the host is transubstantiated, and the other 
Christian verities Avhich it is permitted to common man to 
receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the 
objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. 
For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken 
trance, while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which 
the tongues of men have no appropriate language. 

Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission 
not unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world, of which 
he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to 
earth to establish a theocracy, of which he should himself 
be the first administrator, and to which every tribe and kin- 
dred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a 
sordid, half -distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man 
distingaished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his 
designs than by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, 
the calm perseverance, and the flexible address with which 
he was to pursue them. History affords no more perfect 
illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the shrewd- 
ness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds 
of the heroic order. A Swedenborg- Franklin reconciling 
in himself these antagonist propensities is no monster of the 
fancy. 

Of all the occupations to which man can devote the 
earlier years of his life, none probably leaves on the charac- 
ter an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of 
arms. In no other calling is the whole range of our sym- 
pathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called 
into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other 
stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irre- 



IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA {SAINT). 233 

sistible when once they are effectually aroused from their 
accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath 
he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a 
comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all 
the dangers and hardships he exacted from his followers, 
and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate 
skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim 
that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate 
force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant 
service, if the prospect of success was such that the vague 
and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike terror 
into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. 
To conquer Lutheran ism by converting to the faith of Eome 
the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth was, 
therefore, among the earliest of his projects. 

Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of 
active and especially of military life, Loyola had learned 
the great secret of government — at least, of his government. 
It was that the social affections, if concentrated within a 
well-defined circle, possess an intensity and endurance un- 
rivaled by those passions of which self is the immediate 
object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like 
those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the 
land and the institutions of their fathers — emotions stronger 
than appetite, vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself — 
might be kindled in the members of his order ; if he could 
detect and grasp those mainsprings of human action of 
which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained 
the mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain. 

Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by 
many gross superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps 
some tinge of insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola ; 
but no dispassionate reader of his writings or of his life will 
question his integrity, or deny to him the praise of a devo- 
tion at once sincere, habitual, and profound. It is not to 
the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name of their 



234: GREAT LEADERS, 

greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom 
more than any other man it is owing that the Reformation 
was stayed and the Church of Rome rescued from her im- 
pending doom. 

From amid the controversies which then agitated the 
world had emerged two great truths, of which, after three 
hundred years' debate, we are yet to find the reconcilement. 
It was true that the Christian commonwealth should be one 
consentient body, united under one supreme head, and bound 
together a community of law, of doctrine, and of worship. 
It was also true that each member of that body must for 
himself, on his own responsibility and at his own peril, 
render that worship, study that law, and seek the guidance 
of the Supreme Ruler. Here was a problem for the learned 
and wise, for schools, and presses, and pulpits. But it is 
not by sages nor in the spirit of philosophy that such prob- 
lems receive their practical solution. Wisdom may be the 
ultimate arbiter, but it is seldom the immediate agent in 
human affairs. It is by antagonist passions, prejudices, and 
follies that the equipoise of this most belligerent planet of 
ours is chiefly preserved, and so it was in the sixteenth cent- 
ury. The German pointed the way to that sacred solitude 
where beside the worshiper himself none may enter; the 
Spaniard to that innumerable company which with one 
accord still chant the liturgies of remotest generations. 
Chieftains in the most momentous warfare of which this 
earth had been the theatre since the subversion of paganism, 
each was a rival worthy of the other in capacity, courage, 
disinterestedness, and love of the truth, and yet how mar- 
velous the contrast ! 

Unalluring and, on the whole, unlovely as it is, the image 
of Loyola must ever command the homage of the world. 
No other uninspired man, unaided by military or civil power, 
and making no appeal to the passions of the multitude, has 
had the genius to conceive, the courage to attempt, and the 
success to establish a polity teeming with results at once so 



THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX. 235 

momentous and so distinctly foreseen. Amid his ascetic 
follies and his half-crazy visions, and despite all the coarse 
daubing with which the miracle-mongers of his church have 
defaced it, his character is destitute neither of sublimity nor 
of grace. Men felt that there had appeared among them 
one of those monarchs who reign in right of their own 
native supremacy, and to whom the feebler will of others 
must yield either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was 
a conviction recorded by his disciples on his tomb in these 
memorable and significant words : " Whoever thou mayst 
be who hast portrayed to thine own imagination Pompey nor 
Caesar or Alexander, open thine eyes to the truth, and let 
this marble teach thee how much greater a conqueror than 
they was Ignatius." 



THOMAS CKOMWELL, EAEL OF ESSEX. 

By JOHN EICHARD GREEN. 

[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public 
career as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation 
for administrative ability before his patron's .fall. He acquired the 
notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal when all 
other friends had deserted him. By the king's favor he received the 
highest offices of the state, and was made Prime Minister, finally becom- 
ing earl of Essex. Cromwell was the political leader of the English Ref- 
ormation, and the most effective instrument in concentrating power in 
the hands of the king. His impeachment and execution for high 
treason, however he may have deserved his fate for his cruelty and 
unscrupulousness, was gross ingratitude on the part of Henry.] 

The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was 
the first instance of opposition with which Cromwell had 
met, and for some time longer it was to remain the only one. 
While the great revolution which struck down the Church 
was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the 
earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal 



236 GREAT LEADERS. 

jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of tlie Church 
courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independ- 
ence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the 
king. But from the enslavement of the clergy, from the 
gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of the monas- 
teries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through 
the stray depositions of royal spies that' we catch a glimpse 
of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence 
of a whole people. For the silence was a silence of terror. 
Before Cromwell's rise and after his fall from power the 
reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the common 
tyi*anny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Crom- 
well's administration form the one period in our history 
which deserves the name which men have given to the rule 
of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by 
terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could 
plead for him at a later time with Henry as " one whose 
surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as 
I ever thought, no less than God." 

But the attitude of Cromwell toward the king was some- 
thing more than that of absolute dependence and unques- 
tioning devotion. He was "so vigilant to preserve your 
majesty from all treasons," adds the primate, "that few 
could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same 
from the beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fear- 
less of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the slightest 
breath of hidden disloyalty. It was on this inner dread 
that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was 
hardly secretary before a host of spies were scattered broad- 
cast over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the 
open ear of the minister. The air was thick with tales of 
plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and suppres- 
sion of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king. And 
as it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by 
terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in England, 
to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, " as if 



THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX. 237 

a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone." The confes- 
sional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk with their 
closest friends found its way to his ear. " Words idly 
spoken," the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a 
moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at 
his fall, " tortured into treason." The only chance of safety 
lay in silence. " Friends who used to write and send me 
presents," Erasmus tells us, " now send neither letter nor 
gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through 
fear." 

But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more 
infamous than any that has ever blotted the statute-book of 
England. Not only was thought made treason, but men 
were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very 
silence being punished with the penalties of treason. All 
trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a 
policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest in- 
stitutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though 
"VYolsey had strained the law to the utmost, he had made no 
open attack on the freedom of justice. If he had shrunk 
from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense that they 
were the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion 
of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts 
mere mouth-pieces of the royal will : and where even 
this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed. Par- 
liament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of 
attainder. " He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has 
himself made," was the cry of the council at the moment of 
his fall, and, by a singular retribution, the crowning injustice 
which he sought to introduce even into the practice of at- 
tainder — the condemnation of a man without hearing his 
defense — was only practiced on himself. 

But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell, it* was of a 
nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck 
uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims 
of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because he 



GREAT LEADERS. 

chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If 
he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the 
holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If 
he struck at the baronage, it was through the Courtenays 
and the Poles, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If 
he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder 
of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness 
mingled with his crime. In temper, indeed, so far as we 
can judge from the few stories which lingered among his 
friends, he was a generous, kind-hearted man, with pleasant 
and winning manners which atoned for a certain awkward- 
ness of person, and with a constancy of friendship which 
won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch either 
of love or hate swayed him from his course. 

The student of Macchiavelli had not studied the " Prince " 
in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Frag- 
ments of his papers still show us with what a business-like 
brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual " re- 
membrances " of the day. " Item, the Abbot of Reading to 
be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading." " Item, 
to know the king's pleasure touching Master More." " Item, 
when Master Fisher shall go to his execution, and the other." 
It is indeed this utter absence of all passion, of all personal 
feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most terrible 
in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is 
pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman 
hews his way through the forest, axe in hand. 

His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy 
whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Ref- 
ormation while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. 
The daring boast which his enemies laid afterward to his 
charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his 
system. •" In brief time he would bring things to such a 
pass that the king with all his power should not be able to 
hinder him." His plans rested, like the plan which proved 
fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master. The 



THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX. 239 

short-lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in charges of 
adultery and treason, and in her death in May, 1536. Her 
rival and successor in Henry's affections, Jane Seymour, 
died the next year in cliildbirth ; and Cromwell replaced her 
with a German consort, Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of 
the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to resist 
Henry's caprice, when the king revolted on their first in- 
terview at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new 
bride. Eor the moment Cromwell had brought matters 
" to such a pass " that it was impossible to recoil from the 
marriage. 

The marriage of Anne of Cleves, however, was but the 
first step in a policy which, had it been carried out as he 
designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Riche- 
lieu. Charles and the house of Austria could alone bring 
about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll 
back the Reformation ; and Cromwell was no sooner united 
with the princes of North Germany than he sought to 
league them with France for the overthrow of the emperor. 
Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have 
been changed. Southern Germany would have been secured 
for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years' War averted. He 
failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. The Ger- 
man princes shrank from a contest with the emperor, France 
from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism ; and 
Henry, left alone to bear the resentment of the House of 
Austria, and chained to a wife he loathed, turned savagely 
on Cromwell. The nobles sprang on him with a fierceness 
that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execra- 
tions burst from the lords at the council table, as the Duke 
of Norfolk, who had been charged with the minister's arrest, 
tore the ensign of the garter from his neck. At the charge 
of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a 
passionate cry of despair. " This, then," he exclaimed, " is 
my guerdon for the services I have done ! On your con- 
sciences, I ask you, am I a traitor ? " Then, with a sudden 



240 GREAT LEADERS. 

sense that all was over, he bade his foes " make quick work, 
and not leave me to languish in prison." Quick work was 
made, and a yet louder hurst of popular applause than that 
which hailed the attainder of Cromwell hailed his execution. 



CHAKLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY. 

Br JOHN LOTHEOP MOTLEY. 

[Charles V, of Germany, and king of Spain under title of Charles 
I, born 1500, died 1558. This fortunate monarch inherited from his 
father. Archduke Philip of Austria, the Hapsburg dominion in Ger- 
many ; through his grandmother, the dukedom of Burgundy, which 
included the Netherlands ; and through his maternal grandfather, Fer- 
dinand of Spain, the magnificent dominion of the latter country in 
both the New and Old Worlds. He was elected Emperor of Germany 
by the diet in 1519, and was the most rich and powerful prince in 
Christendom. Among the notable events of his reign were the out- 
break of Luther's reformation, the defeat and capture of Francis I of 
France, the capture and sack of Rome by his generalissimo, the Con- 
stable de Bourbon, the two defeats of the Turkish power in Hungary, 
and the severe punishment of the Mohammedan pirates of Africa. 
Though Charles could turn his arms against the pontiff when policy 
dictated, and was not a religious bigot, he strained every nerve to sup- 
press the Lutheran reformation for political reasons. He was at last, 
however, obliged to assent to a certain degree of religious toleration, 
fixed by the Nuremburg agreement in 1532, and that of Augsburg in 
1548. He abdicated in favor of his son Philip in 1556, and spent the 
last two years of his life in the convent of Yuste in Spain.] 

The edicts and the Inquisition were the gifts of Charles 
to the Netherlands, in return for their wasted treasure and 
their constant obedience. For this his name deserves to be 
handed down to eternal infamy, not only throughout the 
Netherlands hut in every land where a single heart heats for 
political or religious freedom. To eradicate these institu- 
tions after they had been watered and watched by the care 
of his successor, was the work of an eighty years' war, in 
the course of which millions of lives were sacrificed. Yet 




CHARLES THE FIFTH. 



(JBAELES F, EMPEROR OF GERMANY. 241 

the abdicating emperor had summoned his faithful estates 
around him, and stood up before them in his imperial robes 
for the last time, to tell them of the affectionate regard 
which he had always borne them, and to mingle his tears 
with theirs. 

Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many 
thousand graves where human beings had been thrust alive 
by his decree, perhaps there might have been an answer to 
the question propounded by the emperor amid all that pite- 
ous weeping. Perhaps it might have told the man, who 
asked his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever unwittingly 
offended them, that there was a world where it was deemed 
an offence to torture, strangle, burn, and drown one's inno- 
cent fellow-creatures. The usual but trifling excuse for such 
enormities can not be pleaded for the emperor. Charles was 
no fanatic. The man whose armies sacked Eome, who laid 
sacrilegious hand on Christ's vicegerent, and kept the infal- 
lible head of the Church a prisoner to serve his own political 
ends, was then no bigot. He believed in nothing, save that 
when the course of his imperial will was impeded and the 
interests of his imperial house in jeopardy, pontiffs were 
wont to succumb as well as anabaptists. It was the political 
heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious re- 
formers under dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction 
to temporal power, which he was disposed to combat to the 
death. He was too shrev/d a politician not to recognize the 
connection between aspirations for religious and for political 
freedom. His hand was ever ready to crush both heresies 
in one. Had he been a true son of the Church, a faithful 
champion of her infallibility, he would not have submitted 
to the peace of Passau so long as he could bring a soldier to 
the field. 

Yet he acquiesced in the Eef ormation for Germany, while 

the fires were burning for the reformers and were ever blazing 

in the Netherlands, where it was death even to allude to the 

existence of the peace of Passau. Nor did he acquiesce 

11 



242 GREAT LEADERS. 

only from compulsion, for, long before his memorable defeat 
by Maurice, he had permitted the German troops, with whose 
services he could not dispense, regularly to attend Protestant 
worship performed by their own Protestant chaplains. Lu- 
theran preachers marched from city to city of the Nether- 
lands under the imperial banner, while the subjects of those 
patrimonial provinces were daily suffering on the scaffold 
for their non-conformity. 

The influence of this garrison-preaching upon the prog- 
ress of the Reformation in the Netherlands is well known. 
Charles hated Lutherans, but he required soldiers, and he 
thus helped by his own policy to disseminate what, had he 
been the fanatic which he perhaps became in retirement, he 
would have sacrificed his life to crush. It is quite true that 
the growing Calvinism of the provinces was more dangerous, 
both religiously and politically, than the Protestantism of 
the German princes, which had not yet been formally pro- 
nounced heresy ; but it is thus the more evident that it was 
political rather than religious heterodoxy which the despot 
wished to suppress. 

No man, however, could have been more observant of 
religious rites. He heard mass daily. He listened to a ser- 
mon every Sunday and holiday. He confessed and received 
the sacrament four times a year. He was sometimes to be 
seen in his tent at midnight on his knees before a crucifix, 
with eyes and hands uplifted. He ate no meat in Lent, and 
used extraordinary diligence to discover and to punish any 
man, whether courtier or plebeian, who failed to fast during 
the whole forty days. He was too good a politician not to 
know the value of broad phylacteries and long prayers. He 
was too nice an observer of human nature not to know how 
easily mint and cummin could still outweigh the " weightier 
matters of law, judgment, mercy, and faith " ; as if the 
founder of the religion which he professed, and to maintain 
which he had established the inquisition and the edicts, had 
never cried " woe " upon the Pharisees. 



CHARLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY. 243 

Yet there is no doubt that the emperor was at times 
almost popular in the Netherlands, and that he was never 
as odious as his successor. There were some deep reasons 
for this, and some superficial ones ; among others, a singu- 
larly fortunate manner. He spoke German, Spanish, Italian, 
French, and Flemish, and could assume the characteristics 
of each country as easily as he could use its language. He 
could be stately with Spaniards, familiar with Flemings, 
witty with Italians. He could strike down a bull in the 
ring like a matador at Madrid, or win the j^rize in the tour- 
ney like a knight of old ; he could ride at the ring with the 
Flemish nobles, hit the popinjay with his cross-bow among 
Antwerp artisans, or drink beer and exchange rude jests 
with the boors of Brabant. For virtues such as these his 
grave crimes against God and man, against religion and 
chartered and solemnly-sworn rights, have been palliated, as 
if oppression became more tolerable because the oppressor 
was an accomplished linguist and a good marksman. 

But the great reason for his popularity, no doubt, lay in 
his military genius. Charles was inferior to no general of 
his age. " When he was born into the world," said Alva, 
" he was born a soldier " ; and the emperor confirmed the 
statement and reciprocated the compliment, when he de- 
clared that " the three first captains of the age was himself 
first, and then the Duke of Alva and Constable Montmo- 
rency." It is quite true that all his officers were not of the 
same opinion, and many were too apt to complain that his 
constant presence in the field did more harm than good, 
and "that his Majesty would do much better to stay at 
home." There is, however, no doubt that he was both a 
good soldier and a good general. He was constitutionally 
fearless, and he possessed great energy and endurance. He 
was ever the first to arm when a battle was to be fought, 
and the last to take off his harness. He commanded in 
person and in chief, even when surrounded by veterans and 
crippled by the gout. He was calm in great reverses. It 



244 GREAT LEADERS. 

was said that he was never known to change color except 
upon two occasions — after the fatal destruction of his fleet 
at Algiers, and in the memorable flight from Innspruck. 

He was of a phlegmatic, stoical temperament, until shat- 
tered by age and disease; a man without sentiment and 
without a tear. It was said by Spaniards that he was never 
seen to weep, even at the death of his nearest relatives and 
friends, except on the solitary occasion of the departure of 
Don Ferrante Gonzaga from court. Such a temperament 
was invaluable in the stormy career to which he had devoted 
his life. He was essentially a man of action, a military 
chieftain. " Pray only for my health and my life," he was 
accustomed to say to the young officers who came to him 
from every part of his dominions to serve under his ban- 
ners, " for so long as I have these I will never leave you idle 
— at least in France. I love peace no better than the rest 
of you. I was born and bred to arms, and must of necessity 
keep on my harness till I can bear it no longer." The rest- 
less energy and the magnificent tranquillity of his character 
made him a hero among princes, an idol with his officers, a 
popular favorite everywhere. The promptness with which, 
at much personal hazard, he descended like a thunderbolt 
in the midst of the Ghent insurrection ; the juvenile ardor 
with which the almost bed-ridden man arose from his sick- 
bed to smite the Protestants at Miihlberg ; the grim stoicism 
with which he saw sixty thousand of his own soldiers perish 
in the wintry siege of Metz — all insured him a large meas- 
ure of that applause which ever follows military distinction, 
especially when the man who achieves it happens to wear a 
crown. He combined the personal prowess of a knight of 
old with the more modern accomplishments of a scientific 
tactician. He could charge the enemy in person like the 
most brilliant cavalry officer, and he thoroughly understood 
the arrangements of a campaign, the marshaling and vict- 
ualing of troops, and the Avhole art of setting and main- 
taining an army in the field. 



CHARLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY, 245 

Yet, though brave and warlike as the most chivah'ous of 
his ancestors — Gothic, Burgundian, or Suabian — he was en- 
tirely without chivalry. Fanaticism for the faith, protection 
for the oppressed, fidelity to friend or foe, knightly loyalty 
to a cause deemed sacred, the sacrifice of personal interests 
to great ideas, generosity of hand and heart — all those quali- 
ties which unite with courage and constancy to make up 
the ideal chevalier, Charles not only lacked but despised. 
He trampled on the weak antagonist, whether burgher or 
petty potentate. He was false as water. He inveigled his 
foes, who trusted to his imperial promises, by arts unworthy 
an emperor or a gentleman. He led about the unfortunate 
John Frederic, of Saxony, in his own language, " like a bear 
in a chain," ready to be slipped upon Maurice should " the 
boy " prove ungrateful. He connived at the famous forgery 
of the prelate of Arras, to which the Landgrave Philip owed 
his long imprisonment — a villainy worse than many for 
which humbler rogues have suffered by thousands upon the 
gallows. The contemporary world knew well the history of 
his frauds, on scale both colossal and minute, and called him 
familiarly " Charles qui triche." 

The absolute master of realms on which the sun per- 
petually shone, he was not only greedy for additional do- 
minion, but he was avaricious in small matters, and hated 
to part with a hundred dollars. To the soldier who brought 
him the sword and gauntlets of Francis I he gave a hun- 
dred crowns, when ten thousand would have been less than 
the customary present ; so that the man left his presence 
full of desperation. The three soldiers who swam the Elbe, 
with their swords in their mouths, to bring him the boats 
with which he passed to the victory of Miihlberg, received 
from his imperial bounty a doublet, a pair of stockings, and 
four crowns apiece. His courtiers and ministers complained 
bitterly of his habitual niggardliness, and were fain to eke 
out their slender salaries by accepting bribes from every 
hand rich enough to bestow them. In truth, Charles was 



246 GREAT LEADERS. 

more than anything else a politician, notwithstanding his 
signal abilities as a soldier. 

If to have founded institutions which could last be the 
test of statesmanship, he was even a statesman, for many of 
his institutions have resisted the pressure of three centuries ; 
but those of Charlemagne fell as soon as his hand was cold, 
while the works of many ordinary legislators have attained 
to a perpetuity denied to the statutes of Solon or Lycurgus. 
Durability is not the test of merit in human institutions. 
Tried by the only touchstone applicable to governments, 
their capacity to insure the highest welfare of the governed, 
we shall not find his polity deserving of much admiration. 
It is not merely that he was a despot by birth and inclina- 
tion, nor that he naturally substituted, as far as was prac- 
ticable, the despotic for the republican element wherever 
his hand can be traced. There may be possible good in 
despotisms, as there is often much tyranny in democracy. 
Tried, however, according to the standard by which all gov- 
ernments may be measured, those laws of truth and divine 
justice which all Christian nations recognize, and which are 
perpetual, whether recognized or not, we shall find little to 
venerate in the life-work of the emperor. The interests of 
his family, the security of his dynasty — these were his end 
and aim. The happiness or the progress of his people never 
furnished even the indirect motives of his conduct, and the 
result was a baffled policy and a crippled and bankrupt em- 
pire at last. 

He knew men — especially he knew their weaknesses, 
and he knew how to turn them to account. He knew how 
much they would bear, and that little grievances would 
sometimes inflame more than vast and deliberate injustice. 
Therefore he employed natives mainly in the subordinate 
offices of his various states, and he repeatedly warned his 
successor that the haughtiness of Spaniards and the incom- 
patibility of their character with the Flemish would be pro- 
ductive of great difficulties and dangers. It was his opin- 



CHARLES F, E3IPER0U OF GERMANY. 247 

ion that men might be tyrannized more intelligently by 
their own kindred, and in this, perhaps, he Avas right. He 
was indefatigable in the discharge of business ; and if it 
were possible that half a world could be administered as if 
it were the private property of an individual, the task would 
have been, perhaps, as well accomplished by Charles as by 
any man. He had not the absurdity of supposing it possi- 
ble for him to attend to the details of every individual af- 
fair in every one of his realms, and he therefore intrusted 
the stewardship of all specialties to his various ministers 
and agents. It was his business to know men and to deal 
with affairs on a large scale, and in this he certainly was 
superior to his successor. His correspondence was mainly 
in the hands of Granvelle the elder, who analyzed letters re- 
ceived, and frequently wrote all but the signatures of the 
answers. The same minister usually possessed the imperial 
ear, and farmed it out for his own benefit. In all this there 
was, of course, room for vast deception ; but the emperor 
was quite aware of what was going on, and took a philo- 
sophic view of the matter as an inevitable part of his sys- 
tem. Granvelle grew enormously rich under his eye by 
trading on the imperial favor and sparing his Majesty 
much trouble. 

Charles saw it all, ridiculed his peculations, but called 
him his "bed of down." His knowledge of human nature 
was, however, derived from a contemplation mainly of its 
weaknesses, and was therefore one-sided. He was often de- 
ceived and made many a fatal blunder, shrewd politician 
though he was. He involved himself often in enterprises 
which could not be honorable or profitable, and which in- 
flicted damage on his greatest interests. He often offended 
men who might have been useful friends, and converted 
allies into enemies. " His Majesty," said a keen observer 
who knew him well, " has not in his career shown the pru- 
dence which was necessary to him. He has often offended 
those whose love he might have conciliated, converted 



248 GREAT LEADERS. 

friends into enemies, and let those perish who were his most 
faithful partisans." Thus it must be acknowledged that 
even his boasted knowledge of human nature and his power 
of dealing with men was rather superficial and empirical 
than the real gift of genius. 



WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF 
ORANGE. 

By JOHN LOTHEOP MOTLEY. 

[Sumamed "the Silent," founder of the independence of the 
Netherlands, born 1533, assassinated 1584. Though the scion of a 
Protestant family, the Prince of Orange was educated to arms and 
diplomacy at the court of Charles V, by whom he was greatly beloved 
and trusted. On the accession of Philip he was made a Councilor of 
State to assist Margaret of Parma in her regency over the Netherlands. 
All ties of loyalty were gradually destroyed by his love of country, so 
terribly outraged by the cruelties of a bigoted king and his no less 
bigoted agents. On Alva's arrival with Spanish troops the prince re- 
turned to Germany, and thus saved himself from the headsman, the 
fate which befell counts Egmont and Horn, two of the most eminent 
Flemish patriots. In the uprising of the Netherlands, which followed, 
the Prince of Orange was the most eminent figure, and to the con- 
summate skill with which he guided the fate of his people their ulti- 
mate success was due. William, at the head of his brave Flemings, 
and with the capricious assistance of France and England, wore out 
three of the greatest generals of the age, the Duke of Alva, Don John 
of Austria, and Prince Alexander Farnese. The price put on his 
assassination by the King of Spain was finally earned by Baltazar 
Gerard, a Burgundian fanatic] 

In" person, Orange was above the middle height, per- 
fectly well made and sinewy, but rather spare than stout. 
His eyes, hair, beard, and complexion were brown ; his head 
was small, symmetrically shaped, combining the alertness and 
compactness characteristic of the soldier, with the capacious 
brow furrowed prematurely with the horizontal lines of 




WILLIAM OF NASSAU. 



WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE. 249 

thought, denoting the statesman and the sage. His physi- 
cal appearance was, therefore, in harmony with his organiza- 
tion, which was of antique model. Of his moral qualities, 
the most prominent was his piety. He was more than 
anything else a religious man. From his trust in God he 
ever derived support and consolation in the darkest hours. 
Implicitly relying upon Almighty wisdom and goodness, he 
looked danger in the face with a constant smile, and en- 
dured incessant labors and trials with a serenity which 
seemed more than human. While, however, his soul was 
full of piety, it was tolerant of error. 

Sincerely and deliberately himself a convert to the Ee- 
formed Church, he was ready to extend freedom of worship 
to Catholics on the one hand, and to Anabaptists on the 
other ; for no man ever felt more keenly than he, that the 
reformer who becomes in his turn a bigot is doubly odious. 

His firmness was allied to his piety. His constancy in 
bearing the whole weight of as unequal a struggle as men 
have ever undertaken, was the theme of admiration even to 
his enemies. The rock in the ocean, " tranquil amid raging 
billows," was the favorite emblem by which his friends ex- 
pressed their sense of his firmness. From the time when, as 
a hostage in France, he first discovered the plan of Philip 
to plant the Inquisition in the Netherlands, up to the last 
moment of his life, he never faltered in his determination 
to resist that iniquitous scheme. This resistance was the 
labor of his life. To exclude the Inquisition, to maintain 
the ancient liberties of his country, was the task which he 
appointed to himself when a youth of three-and-twenty. 
Never speaking a word concerning a heavenly mission, never 
deluding himself or others with the usual phraseology of 
enthusiasts, he accomplished the task, through danger, amid 
toils, and with sacrifices such as few men have ever been 
able to make on their country's altar; for the disinter- 
ested benevolence of the man was as prominent as his forti- 
tude. 



250 GREAl LEADERS, 

A prince of high rank and with royal revenues, he 
stripped himself of station, wealth, almost, at times, of the 
common necessaries of life, and became, in his country's 
cause, nearly a beggar as well as an outlaw. Nor was he 
forced into his career by an accidental impulse from which 
there was no recovery. Eetreat was ever open to him. Not 
only pardon but advancement was urged upon him again 
and again. Officially and privately, directly and circui- 
tously, his confiscated estates, together with indefinite and 
boundless favors in addition, were offered to him on every 
great occasion. On the arrival of Don John at the Breda 
negotiations, at the Cologne conferences, we have seen how 
calmly these offers were waved aside, as if their rejection 
was so simple that it hardly required many words for its 
signification; yet he had mortgaged his estate so deeply 
that his heirs hesitated at accepting their inheritance, for 
fear it should involve them in debt. Ten years after his 
death, the account between his executors and his brother 
John amounted to one million four hundred thousand 
florins due to the Count, secured by various pledges of real 
and personal property, and it was finally settled upon this 
basis. 

He was, besides, largely indebted to every one of his 
powerful relatives, so that the payment of the incumbrances 
upon his estate very nearly justified the fears of his children. 
While on the one hand, therefore, he poured out these enor- 
mous sums like water, and firmly refused a hearing to the 
tempting offers of the royal government, upon the other 
hand he proved the disinterested nature of his services by 
declining, year after year, the sovereignty over the prov- 
inces, and by only accepting in the last days of his life, 
when refusal had become almost impossible, the limited, 
constitutional supremacy over that portion of them which 
now makes the realm of his descendants. He lived and 
died, not for himself, but for his country. " God pity this 
poor people ! " were his dying words. 



WILL1A3I OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE. 251 

His intellectual faculties were various and of the highest 
order. He had the exact, practical, and combining qualities 
which make the great commander, and his friends claimed 
that, in military genius, he was second to no captain in 
Europe. This was, no doubt, an exaggeration of partial 
attachment, but it is certain that the Emperor Charles had 
an exalted opinion of his capacity for the field. His forti- 
fication of Philippeville and Charlemont, in the face of the 
enemy ; his passage of the Meuse in Alva's sight ; his 
unfortunate but well-ordered campaign against that gener- 
al ; his sublime plan of relief, projected and successfully 
directed at last from his sick bed, for the besieged city of 
Leyden, will always remain monuments of his practical 
military skill. 

Of the soldier's great virtues — constancy in disaster, 
devotion to duty, hopefulness in defeat — no man ever 
possessed a larger share. He arrived, through a series of 
reverses, at a perfect victory. He planted a free common- 
wealth under the very battery of the Inquisition, in defiance 
of the most powerful empire existing. He was, therefore, 
a conqueror in the loftiest sense, for he conquered liberty 
and a national existence for a whole people. The contest 
was long, and he fell in the struggle, but the victory was to 
the dead hero, not to the living monarch. 

It is to be remembered, too, that he always wrought 
with inferior instruments. His troops were usually merce- 
naries, who were but too apt to mutiny upon the eve of 
battle, while he was opposed by the most formidable veter- 
ans of Europe, commanded successively by the first captains 
of the age. That, with no lieutenant of eminent valor or 
experience save only his brother Louis, and with none at 
all after that chieftain's death, William of Orange should 
succeed in baffling the efforts of Alva, Eequescens, Don John 
of Austria, and Alexander Farnese — men whose names are 
among the most brilliant in the military annals of the world 
— is in itself sufficient evidence of his warlike capacity. 



252 GREAT LEADERS. 

At the period of his death, he had reduced the nnmber 
of obedient provinces to two — only Artois and Hainault 
acknowledging Philip — while the other fifteen were in open 
revolt, the greater part having solemnly forsworn their 
sovereign. 

The supremacy of his political genius was entirely be- 
yond question. He was the first statesman of the age. The 
quickness of his perception was only equaled by the cau- 
tion which enabled him to mature the results of his obser- 
vations. His knowledge of human nature was profound. 
He governed the passions and sentiments of a great nation 
as if they had been but the keys and chords of one vast 
instrument; and his hand rarely failed to evoke harmony 
even out of the wildest storms. The turbulent city of 
Ghent, which could obey no other master, which even the 
haughty emperor could only crush without controlling, was 
ever responsive to the master-hand of Orange. His pres- 
ence scared away Imbize and his bat-like crew, confounded 
the schemes of John Casimir, frustrated the wiles of Prince 
Chimay, and while he lived, Ghent was what it ought always 
to have remained, the bulwark, as it had been the cradle, of 
popular liberty. After his death it became its tomb. 

Ghent, saved twice by the policy, the eloquence, the self- 
sacrifices of Orange, fell within three months of his murder 
into the hands of Parma. The loss of this most important 
city, followed in the next year by the downfall of Antwerp, 
sealed the fate of the southern Netherlands. Had the 
prince lived, how different might have been the country's 
fate ! If seven provinces could dilate, in so brief a space, 
into the powerful commonweath which the republic soon 
became, what might not have been achieved by the united 
seventeen — a confederacy which would have united the ada- 
mantine vigor of the Batavian and Frisian races with the 
subtler, more delicate, and more graceful national elements 
in which the genius of the Frank, the Eoman, and the 
Romanized Celt were so intimately blended. As long as 



WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE, 253 

the father of the country lived, such a union was possible. 
His power of managing men was so unquestionable that 
there was always a hope, even in the darkest hour ; for men 
felt implicit reliance as well on his intellectual resources as 
on his integrity. 

This power of dealing with his fellow-men he mani- 
fested in the various ways in which it has been usually ex- 
hibited by statesmen. He possessed a ready eloquence — 
sometimes impassioned, oftener argumentative, always ra- 
tional. His influence over his audience was unexampled in 
the annals of that country or age ; yet he never condescended 
to flatter the people. He never followed the nation, but 
always led her in the path of duty and of honor, and was much 
more prone to rebuke the vices than to pander to the pas- 
sions of his hearers. He never failed to administer ample 
chastisement to parsimony, to jealousy, to insubordination, 
to intolerance, to infidelity, wherever it was due, nor feared 
to confront the states or the people in their most angry 
hours, and to tell them the truth to their faces. This 
commanding position he alone could stand upon, for his 
countrymen knew the generosity which had sacrificed his 
all for them, the self-denial which had eluded rather than 
sought political advancement, whether from king or people, 
and the untiring devotion which had consecrated a whole 
life to toil and danger in the cause of their emancipation. 

While, therefore, he was ever ready to rebuke, and always 
too honest to flatter, he at the same time possessed the elo- 
quence which could convince or persuade. He knew how 
to reach both the mind and the heart of his hearers. His 
orations, whether extemporaneous or prepared ; his written 
messages to the states-general, to the provincial authorities, 
to the municipal bodies ; his private correspondence with men 
of all ranks, from emperors and kings down to secretaries, 
and even children, all show an easy flow of language, a full- 
ness of thought, a power of expression rare in that age, a 
fund of historical allusion, a considerable power of imagi- 



254: GREAT LEADERS. 

nation, a warmth of sentiment, a breadth of view, a direct- 
ness of purpose, a range of qualities, in short, which would 
in themselves have stamped him as one of the master-minds 
of his century, had there been no other monument to his 
memory than the remains of his spoken or written elo- 
quence. 

The bulk of his performances in this department was 
prodigious. Not even Philip was more industrious in the 
cabinet. Not even Granvelle held a more facile pen. He 
wrote and spoke equally well in French, German, or Flem- 
ish; and he possessed, besides, Spanish, Italian, Latin. 
The weight of his correspondence alone would have almost 
sufficed for the common industry of a lifetime; and al- 
though many volumes of his speeches and letters have been 
published, there remain in the various archives of the 
Netherlands and Germany many documents from his hand 
which will probably never see the light. If the capacity for 
unremitted intellectual labor in an honorable cause be the 
measure of human greatness, few minds could be compared 
to the " large composition " of this man. The efforts made 
to destroy the Netherlands by the most laborious and pains- 
taking of tyrants were counteracted by the industry of the 
most indefatigable of patriots. 

He went through life bearing the load of a people's sor- 
rows upon his shoulders with a smiling face. Their name 
was the last word upon his lips, save the simple affirmative, 
with which the soldier who had been battling for the right 
all his lifetime commended his soul in dying " to his great 
captain, Christ." The people were grateful and affection- 
ate, for they trusted the character of their " Father Wiliam," 
and not all the clouds which calumny could collect ever 
dimmed to their eyes the radiance of that lofty mind to 
which they were accustomed, in their darkest calamities, to 
look for light. As long as he lived he was the guiding star 
of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children 
cried in the streets. 



JOHN KNOX, 255 

JOHN KNOX. 

By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 

[The greatest of the Scotch religious reformers, born in 1505, died 
1572, distinguished for a stern fanaticism as intolerant as that of the 
Roman Church, against which he battled. He had suffered bitterly 
from persecution during his earlier life, and for lengthened periods 
been an exile from Scotland, but remained always the head and front 
of the new propaganda till the establishment of the Reformed religion 
in 1560, which carried with it the interdiction of Roman Catholicism. 
On the arrival of the young queen Mary Stuart from France, in 1561, 
Knox soon became the sharpest critic of her life and policy. His un- 
sparing antagonism and influence with the Protestant lords did much 
to make Mary's position a very difRcult one, and to precipitate the 
events which finally drove her from Scotland and made her an English 
prisoner. Knox was known to have been an ardent advocate of Mary's 
death long prior to the queen's execution at Fotheringay.] 

Our primary characteristic of a hero, that he is sincere, 
applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere 
that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is 
among the truest of men. AVith a singular instinct he holds 
to the truth and fact ; the truth alone is there for him, the 
rest a mere shadow and a deceptive nonentity. However 
feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only 
can he take his stand. In the galleys of the river Loire — 
whither Knox and the others, after their castle of St. An- 
drews was taken, had been sent as galley-slaves — some 
officer or priest one day presented them an image of the 
Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous here- 
tics, should do it reverence. " Mother ? Mother of God ? " 
said Knox, when the turn came to him : " This is no 
Mother of God ; this is a ijeiited Iredd — a piece of wood, I 
tell you, with paint on it ! She is fitter for swimming, I 
think, than for being worshiped," added Knox, and flung 
the thing into the river. It Avas not very cheap jesting 
there ; but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was 



256 GREAT LEADERS, 

and must continue nothing other than the real truth ; it 
was a pented hredd : worship it he would not. 

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be 
of courage ; the cause they had was a true one, and must 
and would prosper ; the whole world could not put it down. 
Keality is of God's making ; it is alone strong. How many 
pented hredds^ pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than 
to be worshiped ! This Knox can not live but by fact : he 
clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is 
an instance to us how a man by sincerity itself becomes 
heroic ; it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a 
good, honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one ; a nar- 
row, inconsiderable man as compared with Luther, but in 
heartfelt, instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity^ as we 
say, he has no superior ; nay, one might ask, What equal 
he has? The heart of him is of the true prophet cast. 
" He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, " who 
never feared the face of man." He resembles, more than 
any of the moderns, an old Hebrew prophet. The same 
inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to 
God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that 
forsake truth ; an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an 
Edinburgh minister of the sixteenth century. We are to 
take him for that ; not require him to be other. 

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used 
to make in her own palace to reprove her there, have been 
much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fill 
us with indifference. On reading the actual narrative of 
the business, what Knox said and what Knox meant, I 
must say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They 
are not so coarse, these speeches ; they seem to me about as 
fine as the circumstances would permit. Knox was not 
there to do the courtier ; he came on another errand. Who- 
ever, reading these colloquies of his with the queen, thinks 
they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate 
high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them alto- 



JOHN KNOX. 257 

gether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with 
the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the na- 
tion and cause of Scotland. 

A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth 
made a hunting-field for intriguing, ambitious Guises, and 
the cause of God trampled under foot of falsehoods, formu- 
las, and the devil's cause, had no method of making himself 
agreeable. " Better that women weep," said Morton, " than 
that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was the con- 
stitutional opposition party in Scotland ; the nobles of the 
country, called by their station to take that post, were not 
found in it ; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless 
queen — but still the more hapless country, if she were 
made happy ! Mary herself was not without sharpness 
enough, among her other qualities. " Who are you," said 
she once, " that presume to school the nobles and sovereign 
of this realm ? " " Madam, a subject born within the same," 
answered he. Keasonably answered ! If the " subject " have 
truth to speak, it is not the " subject's " footing that will 
fail him here. 

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is 
good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at 
bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, 
what is tolerance ? Tolerance is to tolerate the unessential, 
and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, 
measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no 
longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to 
tolerate. We are here to resist, to control, and vanquish 
withal. We do not "tolerate" falsehoods, thieveries, in- 
iquities, when they fasten on us ; we say to them. Thou art 
false ! thou art not tolerable ! We are here to extinguish 
falsehoods, and to put an end to them in some wise way. I 
will not quarrel so much with the way ; the doing of the 
thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full 
surely, intolerant. 

A man sent to row in the French galleys, and such like, 



258 GREAT LEADERS. 

for teaching the truth in his own land, can not always be in 
the mildest humor. I am not prepared to say that Knox 
had a soft temper, nor do I know that he had what we call 
an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind, 
honest affections dwell in the much-enduring, hard-worn, 
ever-battling man. That he could rebuke queens, and had 
such weight among those proud, turbulent nobles — proud 
enough, whatever else they were — and could maintain to the 
end a kind of virtual presidency and sovereignty over that 
wild realm, he who was only " a subject born within the 
same " ; this of itself will prove to us that he was found, 
close at hand, to be no mean, acrid man, but at heart a 
healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear 
rule in that kind. They blame him for pulling down cathe- 
drals, and so forth, as if he were a seditious, rioting dema- 
gogue ; precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact in regard to 
cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine. Knox wanted no 
pulling down of stone edifices ; he wanted leprosy and dark- 
ness thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his ele- 
ment. It was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced 
to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy 
of disorder — hates to be in it ; but what then ? Smooth false- 
hood is not order. It is the general sum-total of fZ/sorder. 
Order is truth — each thing standing on the basis that be- 
longs to it. Order and falsehood can not subsist together. 

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of 
drollery in him, which I like much, in combination with 
his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. 
His history, with its rough earnestness, is curiously en- 
livened with this. When the two prelates, entering Glas- 
gow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence, march rapidly 
up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another's 
rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter- 
staves, it is a great sight for him every way. Not mockery, 
scorn, bitterness alone, though there is enough of that too ; 
but a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the 



DUKE OF ALVA. 259 

earnest visage ; not a loud laugh ; you would say a laugli in 
the eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man ; 
brother to the high, brother also to the low ; sincere in his 
sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bordeaux too, we 
find, in that old Edinburgh house of his — a cheery, social 
man, with faces that loved him. They go far wrong who 
think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fa- 
natic. Not at all ; he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, 
cautious, hopeful, patient ; a most shrewd, observing, quietly 
discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of 
character we assign to the Scotch at present. A certain 
sardonic taciturnity is in him ; insight enough, and a 
stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the power 
of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally 
concern him — " They, what are they ? " But the thing 
which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of, 
and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear, all the 
more emphatic for his long silence. 

This prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man. 
He had a sore fight of an existence ; wrestling with popes 
and principalities ; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle ; 
rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore 
fight ; but he won it. " Have you hope ? " they asked him 
in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He 
lifted his finger, " pointed upward with his finger," and so 
died. Honor to him. His works have not died. The letter 
of his work dies, as of all men's, but the spirit of it never. 



DUKE OF ALVA. 

Br JOHN LOTHEOP MOTLEY. 

[Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, a Spanish statesman 
and general, born 1508, died 1583. From his earliest years a soldier, 
the dominating passion of his soul was hatred of heretics and infidels. 
He bore a distinguished part in the wars and negotiations of Charles 
V's splendid reign, and on the accession of Philip II was equally 



260 GREAT LEADERS. 

honored by that monarch. On the outbreak of the rebellion in the 
Netherlands, Alva was sent thither with an army, as viceroy. Ilis six 
years of rule was one of the most bloody and atrocious episodes in 
modern history. His great opponent was the Prince of Orange. 
Utterly failing in stamping out the rebellion, he was recalled by his 
master in 1573.] 

rERDii^A:N'DO Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, was 
the most successful and experienced general of Spain, or of 
Europe. No man studied more deeply, or practiced more 
constantly the military science.' In the most important of 
all arts at that epoch, he was the most consummate artist. 
In the only honorable profession of the age, he was the 
most thorough and the most pedantic professor. Since the 
days of Demetrius Poliorcetes, no man had besieged so 
many cities. Since the days of Fabius Cunctator, no general 
had avoided so many battles, and no soldier, courageous as 
he was, ever attained to a more sublime indifference to cal- 
umny or depreciation. Having proved in his boyhood, at 
Fontarabia, and in his maturity, at Miihlberg, that he could 
exhibit heroism and headlong courage, when necessary, he 
could afford to look with contempt upon the witless gibes 
which his enemies had occasionally perpetrated at his ex- 
pense. Conscious of holding his armies in his hand, by the 
power of an unrivalled discipline, and the magic of a name 
illustrated by a hundred triumphs, he could bear with pa- 
tience and benevolence the murmurs of his soldiers when 
their battles were denied them. 

He was born in 1508, of a family which boasted im- 
perial descent. A Palseologus, brother of a Byzantine em- 
peror, had conquered the city of Toledo, and transmitted 
its appellation as a family name. The father of Ferdinando, 
Hon Garcia, had been slain on the Isle of Gerbes, in battle 
with the Moors, when his son was but four years of age. 
The child was brought up by his grandfather, Don Frederic, 
and trained from his tenderest infancy to arms. Hatred to 
the infidel, and a determination to avenge his father's blood 



DUKE OF ALVA. 261 

crying to liim from a foreign grave, were the earliest of his 
instincts. As a youth he was distinguished for his prowess. 
His maiden sword was fleshed at Fontarabia, where, although 
but sixteen years of age, he was considered by his constancy 
in hardship, by his brilliant and desperate courage, and by 
the example of military discipline which he afforded to the 
troops, to have contributed in no small degree to the success 
of the Spanish arms. 

In 1530 he accompanied the emperor in his campaign 
against the Turks. Charles, instinctively recognizing the 
merit of the youth who was destined to be the life-long com- 
panion of his toils and glories, distinguished him with his 
favor at the opening of his career. Young, brave, and en- 
thusiastic, Ferdinando de Toledo at this period was as 
interesting a hero as ever illustrated the pages of Castilian 
romance. His mad ride from Hungary to Spain and back 
again, accomplished in seventeen days, for the sake of a 
brief visit to his newly-married wife, is not the least attract- 
ive episode in the history of an existence which was destined 
to be so dark and sanguinary. In 1535 he accompanied 
the emperor on his memorable expedition to Tunis. In 
1546 and 1547 he was generalissimo in the war against the 
Smalcaldian league. His most brilliant feat of arms — per- 
haps the most brilliant exploit of the emperor's reign — was 
the passage of the Elbe and the battle of Miihlberg, accom- 
plished in spite of Maximilian's bitter and violent re- 
proaches, and the tremendous possibilities of a defeat. That 
battle had finished the war. 

The gigantic and magnanimous John Frederic, surprised 
at his devotions in the church, fled in dismay, leaving his 
boots behind him, which for their superhuman size were 
ridiculously said afterward to be treasured among the tro-* 
phies of the Toledo house. The rout was total. " I came, 
I saw, and God conquers," said the emperor, in pious parody 
of his immortal predecessor's epigram. Maximilian, with a 
thousand apologies for his previous insults, embraced the 



262 GREAT LEADERS. 

heroic Don Ferdinand over and over again, as, arrayed in a 
plain suit of blue armor, unadorned save with the streaks of 
his enemies' blood, he returned from pursuit of the fugi- 
tive. So complete and so sudden was the victory, that it 
was found impossible to account for it save on the ground 
of miraculous interposition. Like Joshua in the vale of 
Ajalon, Don Ferdinand was supposed to have commanded 
the sun to stand still for a season, and to have been obeyed. 
Otherwise, how could the passage of the river, which was 
only concluded at six in the evening, and the complete 
overthrow of the Protestant forces, have all been accom- 
plished within the narrow space of an April twilight ? 

The reply of the duke to Henry II of France, who ques- 
tioned him subsequently upon the subject, is well known. 
" Your Majesty, I was too much occupied that evening 
with what was taking place on the earth beneath, to pay 
much heed to the evolutions of the heavenly bodies." 
Spared as he had been by his good fortune from taking any 
part in the Algerine expedition, or in witnessing the igno- 
minious retreat from Innspruck, he was obliged to submit 
to the intercalation of the disastrous siege of Metz in the 
long history of his successes. Doing the duty of a field- 
marshal and a sentinel, supporting his army by his firmness 
and his discipline when nothing else could have supported 
them, he was at last enabled, after half the hundred thou- 
sand men with whom Charles had begun the siege had been 
sacrificed, to induce his imperial master to raise the siege 
before the remaining fifty thousand had been frozen or 
starved to death. 

The culminating career of Alva seemed to have closed 
in the mist which gathered around the setting star of the 
empire. Having accompanied Philip to England in 1554, 
on his matrimonial expedition, he was destined in the fol- 
lowing year, as viceroy and generalissimo of Italy, to be placed 
in a series of false positions. A great captain engaged in a 
little war, the champion of the cross in arms against the 



nUKE OF ALVA, 263 

successor of St. Peter, lie had extricated himself at last 
with his usual adroitness, but with very little glory. To 
him had been allotted the mortification, to another the tri- 
umph. The luster of his own name seemed to sink in the 
ocean, while that of a hated rival, with new spangled ore, 
suddenly " flamed in the forehead of the morning sky." 
While he had been paltering with a dotard, whom he was 
forbidden to crush, Egmont had struck down the chosen 
troops of France and conquered her most illustrious com- 
manders. Here was the unpardonable crime which could 
only be expiated by the blood of the victor. Unfortunately 
for his rival, the time was now approaching when the long- 
deferred revenge was to be satisfied. 

On the whole, the Duke of Alva was inferior to no gen- 
eral of his age. As a disciplinarian, he was foremost in 
Spain, perhaps in Europe. A spendthrift of time, he was 
an economist of blood, and this was, perhaps, in the eyes of 
humanity, his principal virtue. " Time and myself are two," 
was a frequent observation of Philip, and his favorite gen- 
eral considered the maxim as applicable to war as to politics. 
Such were his qualities as a military commander. As a 
statesman, he had neither experience nor talent. As a man, 
his character was simple. He did not combine a great 
variety of vices, but those which he had were colossal, and 
he possessed no virtues. He was neither lustful nor intem- 
perate, but his professed eulogists admitted his enormous 
avarice, while the world has agreed that such an amount of 
stealth and ferocity, of patient vindictiveness and universal 
bloodthirstiness, were never found in a savage beast of the 
forest, and but rarely in a human bosom. His history was 
now to show that his previous thrift of human life was not 
derived from any love of his kind. Personally he was stern 
and overbearing. As difficult of access as Philip himself, 
he was even more haughty to those who were admitted to 
his presence. 

The duke's military fame was unquestionable Avhen he 



264 GREAT LEADERS. 

came to the provinces, and both in stricken fields and in 
long campaigns he showed how thoroughly it had been 
deserved ; yet he left the Netherlands a baffled man. The 
prince might be many times defeated, but he was not con- 
quered. As Alva penetrated into the heart of the ancient 
Batavian land, he found himself overmatched as he had 
never been before, even by the most potent generals of his 
day. More audacious, more inventive, more desperate than 
all the commanders of that or any other age, the spirit of 
national freedom now taught the oppressor that it was in- 
vincible, except by annihilation. The same lesson had been 
read in the same thickets by the Nervii to Julius Caesar, by 
the Batavians to the legions of Vespasian ; and now a loftier 
and a purer flame than that which inspired the national 
struggles against Rome glowed within the breasts of the 
descendants of the same people, and inspired them with the 
strength which comes from religious enthusiasm. 

As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of 
the country, Alva at once reduced its institutions to a fright- 
ful simplicity. In the place of the ancient laws of which 
the Netherlanders were so proud, he substituted the Blood 
Council. This tribunal was even more arbitrary than the 
Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny 
devised than this great labor-saving machine. Never was so 
great a quantity of murder and robbery achieved with such 
dispatch and regularity. Sentences, executions, and con- 
fiscations, to an incredible extent, were turned out daily 
with an appalling precision. For this invention Alva is 
alone responsible. The tribunal and its councilors were 
the work and the creatures of his hand, and faithfully did 
they accomplish the dark purpose of their existence. Nor 
can it be urged, in extenuation of the governor's crimes, 
that he was but the blind and fanatically loyal slave of his 
sovereign. 

A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with 
such slaughter-house work, but might have sought to miti- 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 265 

gate the royal policy without forswearing allegiance. A 
nature less rigid than iron would at least have manifested 
compunction, as it found itself converted into a fleshless in- 
strument of massacre. More decided than his master, how- 
ever, he seemed by his promptness to rebuke the dilatory 
genius of Philip. The king seemed, at times, to loiter over 
his work, teasing and tantalizing his appetite for vengeance 
before it should be gratified. Alva, rapid and brutal, 
scorned such epicureanism. He strode with gigantic steps 
over haughty statutes and popular constitutions ; crushing 
alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for 
their jury, and the ignoble artisans who could appeal only 
to the laws of their land. From the pompous and theatrical 
scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the nineteen halters pre- 
pared by Master Karl to hang up the chief bakers and brewers 
of Brussels on their own thresholds ; from the beheading of 
the twenty nobles on the horse-market, in the opening of 
the governor's career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at 
its close ; from the block on which fell the honored head of 
Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient 
gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of 
vicarious mercy; from one year's end to another's — from 
the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the 
eye and hand of the great master directed without weari- 
ness the task imposed by the sovereign. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 

By JOHN EICHAED GREEN. 

[Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, second queen-regnant 
of England, born 1533, crowned 1558, died 1603. As princess during 
the reign of her sister, Queen Mary, she was subjected to many perils 
on account of her devotion to Protestantism. Shortly after her acces- 
sion to the throne she was declared illegitimate by the pope and the 
Catholic kings of Europe, and a claim of the English succession set 
12 



266 GREAT LEADERS, 

up for Mary, Queen of Scots. Threatened on all sides, Queen Eliza- 
beth bore herself with consummate skill and prudence, and even man- 
aged to make herself felt aggressively in continental affairs. The 
more striking events of her reign were the defeat of the great Spanish 
Armada, probably the most brilliant and complete sea-victory recorded 
in history, and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, her rival and 
captive. Queen Elizabeth's reign shines as probably the most remark- 
able known for its intellectual flowering in every branch of human 
energy.] 



England's one hope lay in the character of her queen. 
Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she 
had more than her mother's beauty; her figure was com- 
manding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her 
eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amid the liberal 
culture of Henry's court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, 
a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished 
scholar. She studied every morning the Greek Testament, 
and followed this by the tragedies of Sophocles or orations 
of Demosthenes, and could " rub up her rusty Greek " at 
need to bandy pedantry with a vice-chancellor. But she 
was far from being a mere pedant. The new literature 
which was springing up around her found constant welcome 
in her court. She spoke Italian and French as fluently as 
her mother-tongue. She was familiar with Ariosto and 
Tasso. Even amid the affectation and love of anagrams 
and puerilities which sullied her later years, she listened 
with delight to the " Faery Queen," and found a smile for 
" Master Spenser " when he appeared in her presence. Her 
moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed 
blood within her veins. 

She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne 
Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and 
hearty address, her love of popularity and of free intercourse 
with the people, her dauntless courage, and her amazing 
self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike voice, her impetuous 
will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her 



QUEEN ELIZABETH, 267 

with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they 
were school-boys ; she met the insolence of Essex with a box 
on the ear ; she would break noAV and then into the gravest 
deliberations to swear at her ministers like a fish- wife. But 
strangely in contrast with the violent outlines of her Tudor 
temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she derived 
from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with 
Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to 
move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a 
series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a 
caliph's dream. She loved gayety and laughter and wit. A 
happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win 
her favor. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumer- 
able. Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity of 
a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for 
her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. " To see her was 
heaven," Hatton told her, " the lack of her was hell." She 
would play with her rings that her courtiers might note the 
delicacy of her hands ; or dance a coranto that the French 
ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might 
report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her 
frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests, gave color to a 
thousand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her por- 
traits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or 
self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy 
veiled the voluptuous temper which had broken out in the 
romps of her girlhood and showed itself almost ostenta- 
tiously throughout her later life. Personal beauty in a man 
was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome 
young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, 
and fondled her " sweet Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face 
of the court. 

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted 
held Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a 
frivolous woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how " a 
wanton " could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. 



268 GREAT LEADERS. 

But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of 
Elizabeth. The willfulness of Henry, the triviality of Anne 
Boleyn, played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a 
temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched 
by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving 
as she seemed, Elizabeth lived simply and frugally, and she 
Avorked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight what- 
ever with her in state affairs. The coquette of the presence- 
chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at 
the council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her c'ourtiers, 
she would tolerate no flattery in the closet ; she was herself 
plain and downright of speech with her counselors, and 
she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in re- 
turn. If any trace of her sex lingered in her actual states- 
manship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of pur- 
pose that often underlies a woman's fluctuations of feeling. 
It was this, in part, which gave her her marked superi- 
ority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group of 
ministers ever gathered round a council-board than those 
who gathered round the council-board of Elizabeth. But 
she. was the instrument of none. She listened, she weighed, 
she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her 
policy as a whole was her own. It was a policy not of 
genius but of good sense. Her aims Avere simple and obvi- 
ous : to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to 
restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly 
caution and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless in- 
difference with which she set aside the larger schemes of 
ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. She 
was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She 
rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make 
her " head of the religion " and " mistress of the seas." But 
her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this 
wise limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any 
of her counselors of her real resources ; she knew instinctive- 
ly how far she could go and what she could do. Her cold, 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 269 

critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic 
either to exaggerate or to underestimate her risks or her 
power. 

Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more gener- 
ous sense Elizabeth had little or none ; but her political tact 
was unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but 
she played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, 
as a musician runs his fingers over the key-board, till she 
hit suddenly upon the right one. Her nature was essentially 
practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan, in fact, 
just in proportion to its speculative range or its outlook 
into the future. H^r notion of statesmanship lay in watch- 
ing how things turned out around her, and in seizing the 
moment for making the best of them. A policy of this 
limited, practical, tentative order was not only best suited 
to the England of her day, to its small resources and the 
transitional character of its religious and political belief, 
but it was one eminently suited to Elizabeth's peculiar 
powers. It was a policy of detail, and in details her wonder- 
ful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exercise. 
" No war, my lords," the queen used to cry imperiously at 
the council-board, " No war ! " but her hatred of war sprang 
less from her aversion to blood or to expense, real as was 
her aversion to both, than from the fact that peace left the 
field open to the diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues in 
which she excelled. Her delight in the consciousness of 
her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish freaks — freaks 
in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the pur- 
pose of sheer mystification. She reveled in " by-ways " and 
" crooked ways." She played with grave cabinets as a cat 
plays with a mouse, and with much of the same feline de- 
light in the mere embarrassment of her victims. When she 
was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen, she turned to 
find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers. 

Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign, she would 
have prided herself not on the triumph of England or the 



270 GREAT LEADERS. 

ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hood- 
winked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during 
fifty years. Nor was her trickery without political yalue. 
Ignoble, inexpressibly wearisome as the queen's diplomacy 
seems to us now, tracing it as we do through a thousand 
dispatches, it succeeded in its main end. It gained time, 
and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth's strength. 
Nothing is more revolting in the queen, but nothing is 
more characteristic than her shameless mendacity. It was 
an age of political lying, but in the profusion and reckless- 
ness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christen- 
dom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means 
of meeting a difficulty ; and the ease with which she asserted 
or denied whatever suited her purpose, was only equaled by 
the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure 
of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. The 
same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the 
dexterous use she made of her very faults. Her levity 
carried her gayly over moments of detection and embarrass- 
ment where better women would have died of shame. She 
screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under 
the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned 
her very luxury and sports to good account. There were 
moments of grave danger in her reign, when the country 
remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the queen give 
her days to haAvking and hunting and her nights to danc- 
ing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly 
fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic 
comedies she played with the successive candidates for her 
hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, 
she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and 
conspiracies by love-sonnets and romantic interviews, or of 
gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out 
of a flirtation. 

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of 
lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 271 

in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a 
cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout 
temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a singu- 
lar tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time 
to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no 
hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse ; 
but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike 
hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self-con- 
fidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong 
natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. 
" Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," Walsingham wrote 
bitterly ; " I wish she would trust more in Almighty 
God." The diplomatists who censured at one moment her 
irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the 
next her " obstinacy," her iron will, her defiance of what 
seemed to them inevitable ruin. " This woman," Philip's 
envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, " this woman is 
possessed by a hundred thousand devils." 

To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her 
manoeuvres and retreats, of her " by-ways " and " crooked 
ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. 
Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish main 
or glided between the icebergs of Baffin Bay never doubted 
that the palm of bravery lay with their queen. Her steadi- 
ness and courage in the pursuit of her aims was equaled by 
the wisdom with which she chose the men to accomplish 
them. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a 
wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. 
The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just 
as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her 
success, indeed, in securing from the beginning of her reign 
to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely 
the right men for the work she set them to do, sprang in 
great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intel- 
lect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of 
the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the 



272 GREAT LEADERS. 

universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them all. 
Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy 
with Bruno; she could discuss euphuism with Lyly, and 
enjoy the chivalry of Essex ; she could turn from talk of 
the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and 
treasury books ; she could pass from tracking traitors with 
Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to 
calculate with Frobisher the chances of a northwest passage 
to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her 
mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellect- 
ual movement of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct on 
its higher representatives. But the greatness of the queen 
rests above all on her power over her people. 

We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so 
l^opular as Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of 
admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the 
" Faery Queen," throbbed as intensely through the veins of 
her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of 
half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen ; and 
her immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, 
failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national idea. 
Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the general devo- 
tion. A Puritan, whose hand she cut off in a freak of tyr- 
annous resentment, waved his hat with the hand that was 
left, and shouted, " God save Queen Elizabeth ! " Of her 
faults, indeed, England beyond the circle of her court knew 
little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were 
never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large 
could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by 
its temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. 
But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her 
rule at home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the 
firmness and moderation of her government, the judicious 
spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring fac- 
tions, which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity 
at a time when almost every other country in Europe was 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. ^^ilZ 

torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, 
the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of 
stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and 
justly told, in Elizabeth's favor. 

In one act of her civil administration she showed the 
boldness and originality of a great ruler ; for the opening of 
her reign saw her face the social difficulty which had so 
long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commission 
of inquiry which ended in the solution of the problem by 
the system of poor-laws. She lent a ready patronage to the 
new commerce ; she considered its extension and protection 
as a part of public policy, and her statue in the center of 
the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the mer- 
chant class to the interest with which she watched and 
shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a gen- 
eral gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the 
martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from blood- 
shed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never 
wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all, there 
was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the 
national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. 
She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her 
people, and when she must give way before the new senti- 
ment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fostered. 
But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of vic- 
tory ; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won 
back at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her 
attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride 
in the well-being of her subjects, and whose longing for 
their favor, was the one warm touch in the coldness of her 
natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love any- 
thing, she loved England. " Nothing," she said to her 
first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, " nothing, no 
worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love 
and good-will of my subjects." And the love and good-will 
which were so dear to her she fully won. 



274 GREAT LEADERS. 

She clung, perhaps, to her popularity the more passion- 
ately that it hid in some measure from her the terrible loneli- 
ness of her life. She was the last of the Tudors, the last of 
Henry's children; and her nearest relatives were Mary 
Stuart and the house of Suffolk, one the avowed, the other 
the secret, claimant of her throne. Among her mother's 
kindred she found but a single cousin. Whatever womanly 
tenderness she had, wrapped itself around Leicester; but 
a marriage with Leicester was impossible, and every other 
union, could she even have bent to one, was denied to her 
by the political difficulties of her position. The one cry of 
bitterness which burst from Elizabeth revealed her terrible 
sense of the solitude of her life. " The Queen of Scots," 
she cried at the birth of James, " has a fair son, and I am 
but a barren stock." But the loneliness of her position only 
reflected the loneliness of her nature. She stood utterly 
apart from the world around her, sometimes above it, some- 
times below it, but never of it. It was only on its intellect- 
ual side that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. 
All its moral aspects were simply dead to her. 

It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness 
by the new moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse 
through the whole people, when honor and enthusiasm took 
colors of poetic beauty, and religion became a chivalry. But 
the finer sentiments of the men around her touched Eliza- 
beth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched 
her. • She made her market with equal indifference out of 
the heroism of William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. 
The noblest aims and lives were only counters on her board. 
She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. 
Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance ; and while 
England was thrilling with its triumph over the Armada, 
its queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making 
her 23rofit out of the sj^oiled provisions she had ordered for 
the fleet that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, 
she was for the most part deaf. She accepted services such 



MAEY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 275 

as were never rendered to any other English sovereign with- 
out a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in 
saving her life and throne, and she left him to die a beggar. 
But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of 
sympathy that she owed some of the grander features of her 
character. If she was without love, she v/as without hate. 
She cherished no petty resentments ; she never stooped to 
envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was in- 
different to abuse. Her good-humor was never ruffled by 
the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesu- 
its filled every court in Europe. She was insensible to 
fear. Her life became at last the mark for assassin after 
assassin, but the thought of peril was the one hardest to 
bring home to her. Even when the Catholic plots broke 
out in her very household, she would listen to no proposals 
for tlie removal of Catholics from her court. 



MAKY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 

Br DAVID HUME. 

[Daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Lorraine, a princess 
of the Guise family of France, born 1542, died 1587. As great-grand- 
daughter of Henry VII of England, Mary was heir to the English 
throne after the failure of direct descendants of Henry VIII, the last 
of whom was Queen Elizabeth. At the age of sixteen she was married 
to the dauphin of France ; and, as she was put forward as claimant of 
the English throne (even as against Elizabeth, whom the Catholic 
powers of Europe affected to treat as the illegitimate daughter of 
Henry VIII), the arms of England were quartered with those of France 
and Scotland on her escutcheon. Mary's persistence in protruding 
this claim, under advice of her Catholic, friends was a main cause of 
the misfortunes of her sad and romantic career. On the death of 
Mary's husband, Francis II of France, she returned to Scotland to 
resume the functions of government, thoroughly imbued with Catholic 
and French notions of policy, and already antagonistic to a large por- 
tion of her subjects, who had become fanatically Protestant under the 
leadership of such men as John Knox. Henceforward the Queen of 



276 GREAT LEADERS, 

Scots was embarked on a sea of troubles, -which are familiar history. 
She married Lord Darnley in 1565, against the wish of her own Prot- 
estant subjects and of Queen Elizabeth ; and on the murder of Darnley 
by the Earl of Both well, she consummated her follies by espousing the 
latter. The rebellion which ensued resulted first in her imprisonment 
by her own subjects, and afterward, consequent on her escape and 
defeat in battle by the Protestant lords, her confinement by the Queen 
of England, on whom she had thrown herself for protection. For 
nineteen years Mary was the inmate of successive English prisons, 
though not rigorously treated otherwise. The numerous conspiracies in 
which she was implicated by the enthusiasm of her supporters in Eng- 
land and France, some of which involved the assassination of Eliza- 
beth, and all of which looked to the complete overthrow of Protest- 
antism, at last caused her trial and condemnation by an English 
commission. The signature to the death-warrant has been claimed by 
some historians to have been a forgery ; by others to have been genuine, 
but its commission under the great seal an act without Elizabeth's 
consent. But the weight of evidence shows Elizabeth's conduct to 
have been a piece of consummate duplicity, and that she manoeuvred 
to receive the benefits of Mary's death without incurring the odium of 
its authority. There is no personage in history whose character has 
been the subject of more controversy. A school of English historical 
critics, among whom are Carlyle, Froude, and Kingsley, stigmatize her 
as the incarnation of all that was brilliantly wicked; while others, 
equally distinguished, soften her errors and eulogize her virtues as the 
victim of circumstances, and one " far more sinned against than sin- 
ning."] 

Her change of abode and situation was very little agree- 
able to the Scottish princess. Besides her natural jorepos- 
sessious in favor of a country in which she had been edu- 
cated from her earliest infancy, and where she had borne so 
high a rank, she could not forbear both regretting the 
society of that people, so celebrated for their humane dispo- 
sition and their respectful attachment to their sovereign, 
and reflecting on the disparity of the scene which lay before 
her. It is said that, after she was embarked at Calais, she 
kept her eyes fixed on the coast of France, and never turned 
them from that beloved object till darkness fell and inter* 
cepted it from her view. She then ordered a couch to be 



MAEY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 277 

spread for her in the open air, and charged the pilot that 
if in the morning the land were still in sight, he should 
awake her, and afford her one parting view of that country 
in which all her affections were centered. The weather proved 
calm, so that the ship made little way in the night-time, 
and Mary had once more an opportunity of seeing the 
French coast. She sat up on her couch, and, still looking 
toward the land, often repeated these words : " Farewell, 
France, farewell ; I shall never see thee more." 

The first aspect, however, of things in Scotland was 
more favorable, if not to her pleasure and happiness, at least 
to her repose and security, than she had reason to appre- 
hend. No sooner did the French galleys appear off Leith, 
than people of all ranks, who had long expected their arrival, 
flocked toward the shore with an earnest impatience to be- 
hold and receive their young sovereign. Some were led by 
duty, some by interest, some by curiosity ; and all combined 
to express their attachment to her, and to insinuate them- 
selves into her confidence on the commencement of her 
administration. She had now reached her nineteenth year, 
and the bloom of her youth and amiable beauty of her 
person were further recommended by the affability of her 
address, the politeness of her manners, and the elegance of 
her genius. Well accomplished in all the superficial but en- 
gaging graces of a court, she afforded, when better known, 
still more promising indications of her character ; and men 
prognosticated both humanity from her soft and obliging 
deportment, and penetration from her taste in all the refined 
arts of music, eloquence, and poetry. And as the Scots had 
long been deprived of the presence of their sovereign, whom 
they once despaired ever more to behold among them, her 
arrival seemed to give universal satisfaction ; and nothing 
a2:)peared about the court but symptoms of affection, joy, 
and festivity. 

But there was one circumstance which blasted all these 
promising appearances, and bereaved Mary of that general 



278 GREAT LEADERS. 

favor which her agreeable manners and judicious deport- 
ment gave her just reason to expect. She was still a papist ; 
and though she published, soon after her arrival, a procla- 
mation enjoining every one to submit to the established 
religion, the preachers and their adherents could neither be 
reconciled to a person polluted with so great an abomina- 
tion, nor lay aside their jealousies of her future conduct. 
It was with great difficulty she could obtain permission for 
saying mass in her own chapel ; and had not the people ap- 
prehended that, if she had here met with a refusal, she 
would instantly have returned to France, the zealots never 
would have granted her even that small indulgence. The 
cry was, " Shall we suffer that idol to be again erected with- 
in the realm ? " 

The whole life of Mary was, from the demeanor of these 
men, filled with bitterness and sorrow. The rustic apostle 
John Knox scruples not, in his history, to inform us that 
he once treated her with such severity that she lost all com- 
mand of temper, and dissolved in tears before him ; yet, 
so far from being moved with youth and beauty, and royal 
dignity reduced to that condition, he persevered in his inso- 
lent reproofs.; and when he relates this incident, he dis- 
covers a visible pride and satisfaction in his own conduct. 
The pulpits had become mere scenes of railing against the 
vices of the court ; among which were always noted, as the 
principal, feasting, finery, dancing, balls, and whoredom, 
their necessary attendant. Some ornaments which the 
ladies at that time wore upon their petticoats, excited 
mightily the indignation of the preachers; and they af- 
firmed that such vanity would provoke God's vengeance, 
not only against these foolish women but against the whole 
realm. 

Mary, whose age, condition, and education invited her 
to liberty and cheerfulness, was curbed in all amusements 
by the absurd severity of these reformers ; and she found, 
every moment, reason to regret her leaving that country 



3IAEY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS. 279 

from whose manners she had, in her early youth, received 
the first impressions. Her two uncles, the Duke of Aumale 
and the Grand Prior, with the other French nobility, soon 
took leave of her ; the Marquis of Elbeuf remained some 
time longer; but after his departure she was left to the 
society of her own subjects — men unacquainted with the 
pleasures of conversation, ignorant of arts and civility, and 
corrupted beyond their usual rusticity by a dismal fanati- 
cism, which rendered them incapable of all humanity or im- 
provement. Though Mary had made no attempt to restore 
the ancient religion, her popery was a sufficient crime ; 
though her behavior was hitherto irreproachable, and her 
manners sweet and engaging, her gayety and ease were in- 
terpreted as signs of dissolute vanity; and to the harsh 
and J)reposterous usage which this princess met with may 
in part be ascribed those errors of her subsequent conduct, 
which seemed so little of a piece with the general tenor of 
her character. 

Mary was a woman of great accomplishments both of 
body and mind, natural a^ well as acquired, but unfortunate 
in her life, and during one period very unhappy in her con- 
duct. The beauties of her person and graces of her air 
combined to make her the most amiable of women ; and 
the charms of her address and conversation aided the im- 
l^ression which her lovely figure made on the hearts of all 
beholders. Ambitious and active in her temper, yet in- 
clined to cheerfulness and society ; of a lofty spirit, constant 
and even vehement in her purpose, yet polite, and gentle, 
and affable in her demeanor, she seemed to partake only so 
much of the male virtues as to render her estimable, without 
relinquishing those soft graces which compose the proper 
ornament of her sex. 

In order to form a just idea of her character, we must 
set aside one part of her conduct, while she abandoned her- 
self to the guidance of a profligate man, and must consider 
these faults, whether we admit them to be imprudences or 



280 GREAT LEADERS. 

crimes, as the result of an inexplicable though not uncom- 
mon inconstancy in the human mind, of the frailty of our 
nature, of the violence of passion, and of the influence which 
situations, and sometimes momentary incidents, have on 
persons whose principles are not thoroughly confirmed by 
experience and reflection. Enraged by the ungrateful con- 
duct of her husband, seduced by the treacherous counsels of 
one in whom she reposed confidence, transported by the 
violence of her own temper, which never lay sufficiently 
under the guidance of discretion, she was betrayed into 
actions which may with some difficulty be accounted for, 
but which admit of no apology, nor even of alleviation. 
An enumeration of her qualities might carry the ap- 
pearance of a panegyric ; an account of her conduct must 
in some parts wear the aspect of severe satire and in- 
vective. 

Her numerous misfortunes, the solitude of her long and 
tedious captivity, and the persecutions to which she had 
been exposed on account of her religion, had wrought her 
up to a degree of bigotry during her later years ; and such 
were the prevalent spirit and principles of the age, that it is 
the less wonder if her zeal, her resentment, and her interest 
uniting, induced her to give consent to a design which con- 
spirators, actuated only by the first of these motives, had 
formed against the life of Elizabeth. 



JOHN PYM. 

By JOHN EICHARD GEEEN. 

[Born 1584, died in 1643. Leader of the House of Commons in its 
contest with Charles I, he was the most able and indefatigable op- 
ponent of royal usurpation, and the most active agent in the impeach- 
ment of the Earl of Strafford. From a pamphlet written just before 
his death, when war in the field had begun between king and people, 
it seems doubtful whether he would not in the end have resisted the 



JOHN PYM, 281 

usurpation of power by Cromwell and the Independents, and supported 
the king as the least of two evils.] 

If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, 
the leader of the Commons from the first meeting of the 
new houses at AVestminster, stands out for all after time 
as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire gentleman 
of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public 
life in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his 
patriotism at its close. He had been a leading member in 
that of 1620, and one of the "twelve ambassadors" for 
whom James ordered chairs to be set at Whitehall. Of the 
band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side in 
the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of 
Charles he was almost the sole survivor. Coke had died of 
old age ; Cotton's heart was broken by oppression ; Eliot 
had perished in the tower; AVentworth had apostatized. 
Pym alone remained, resolute, patient as of old ; and as the 
sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years 
of deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things 
clung almost passionately to the man, who never doubted of 
the final triumph of freedom and the law. At their close, 
Clarendon tells us, in words all the more notable for their 
bitter tone of hate, " he was the most popular man, and the 
most able to do hurt, that has lived at any time." 

He had shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting 
was over he showed he knew how to act. On the eve of 
the Long Parliament he rode through England to quicken 
the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last ; 
and on the assembling of the Commons, he took his place 
not merely as member for Tavistock but as their ac- 
knowledged head. Few of the country gentlemen, indeed, 
who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any pre- 
vious House ; and of the few, none represented in so emi- 
nent a way the parliamentary tradition on which the coming 
struggle was to turn. Pym's eloquence, inferior in boldness 
and originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better 



282 GREAT LEADERS. 

suited by its massive and logical force to convince and guide 
a great party ; and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a 
dexterity and order in the management of public business, 
and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, 
which gave a form and method to parliamentary proceed- 
ings such as they had never had before. Valuable, however, 
as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality which 
raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of parlia- 
mentary leaders. 

Of the five hundred members who sat round him at 
St. Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, 
and as clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which 
lay before them. It was certain that Parliament would be 
drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It was probable that 
in such a struggle the House of Commons would be ham- 
pered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of 
Lords. The legal antiquaries of the older constitutional 
school stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate 
powers — a conflict for which no provision had been made 
by the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful 
and conflicting light. But, with a knowledge of precedent 
as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his 
grasp of constitutional principles. He was the first English 
statesman who discovered, and applied to the political cir- 
cumstances around him, what may be called the doctrine of 
constitutional proportion. He saw that, as an element of 
constitutional life, Parliament was of higher value than the 
Crown ; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essen- 
tial part was the House of Commons. On these two facts 
he based his whole policy in the contest which followed. 

AVhen Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym 
treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the part of 
the sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two 
Houses until new arrangements were made. When the 
Lords obstructed public business, he warned them that ob- 
struction would only force the Commons " to save the king- 



JOHN PYM. 283 

dom alone." Revolutionary as these principles seemed at 
the time, they have both been recognized as bases of our 
constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was 
established by the Convention and Parliament which fol- 
lowed on the departure of James II ; the second by the ac- 
knowledgment on all sides, since the Eeform Bill of 1832, 
that the government of the country is really in the hands 
of the House of Commons, and can only be carried on by 
ministers who represent the majority of that House. Pym's 
temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the temper of a 
revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their 
range of sympathy or action. 

Serious as his purpose was, his manners were genial, and 
even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against 
Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle ; and the grace and 
gayety of his social tone, even when the care and weight of 
public affairs were bringing him to the grave, gave rise to a 
hundred silly scandals among the prurient royalists. It was 
this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive 
force in his nature which marked him out from the first 
moment of power as a born ruler of men. He proved him- 
self at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of 
demagogues. He was equally at home in tracking the 
subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in kindling popular 
passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when 
his work really began — for he was born in 1584, four years 
before the coming of the Armada — he displayed from the 
first meeting of the Long Parliament the qualities of a great 
administrator, an immense faculty for labor, a genius for 
organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confidence 
in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under 
good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. 
No English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of 
natural temper or a wider capacity for government than the 
Somersetshire squire, whom his enemies, made clear-sighted 
by their hate, greeted truly enough as " King Pym." 



284: GREAT LEADERS, 

HENEY IV, KING OF FRANCE. 

By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 

[First French king of the Bourbon family, born king of Navarre 
1553, assassinated 1610. Educated a Huguenot, he, as representing 
this religious party, was married to Marguerite de Valois, the sister of 
Charles IX, to signalize the pretended reconciliation of religious dif- 
ferences, a few days before the massacre of St. Bartholomew. For four 
years he was detained at the French court and compelled to abjure 
his faith, till he succeeded in escaping and putting himself at the head 
of the Protestant forces. After a life of remarkable vicissitudes, 
Henry of Navarre became de jure king of France as the next of sur- 
viving blood after Henry III, but was not crowned till 1794, at which 
time he, for political reasons, again and finally abjured Protestant- 
ism. Paris, and shortly afterward the whole of France, then submitted 
to his rule. During his reign of sixteen years Henry showed the 
highest qualities of the great ruler, and his genius promised to make 
him as powerful a potentate as Charles V had been, when he fell by 
the knife of the assassin Ravaillac.] 

At his very name a figure seems to leap forth from the 
mist of three centuries, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life. 
Such was the intense vitality of the Bearnese prince, that 
even now he seems more thoroughly alive and recognizable 
than half the actual personages who are fretting their hour 
upon the stage. 

We see at once a man of moderate stature, light, 
sinewy, and strong ; a face browned with continual exposure ; 
small, mirthful, yet commanding blue eyes, glittering from 
beneath an arching brow, and prominent cheek-bones; a 
long, hawk's nose, almost resting upon a salient chin ; a 
pendent mustache, and a thick, brown, curly beard, pre- 
maturely grizzled ; we see the mien of frank authority and 
magnificent good-humor ; we hear the ready sallies of the 
shrewd Gascon mother-wit; we feel the electricity which 
flashes out of him and sets all hearts around him on fire, 
when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong, desper- 



HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE. 285 

ate charge, the snow-white plume waving where the fire is 
hottest, the large capacity for enjoyment of the man, riot- 
ing without affectation in the certaminis gaudia^ the in- 
sane gallop, after the combat, to lay its trophies at the feet 
of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit its fruits 
— all are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the 
hundred pitched battles, the two hundred sieges, in which 
the Bearnese was personally present, had been occurrences 
of our own day. 

He at last was both king and man, if the monarch who 
occupied the throne was neither. He was the man to prove, 
too, for the instruction of the patient letter-writer of the 
Escorial,* that the crown of France was to be won with 
foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be 
caught by the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets 
of diplomatic intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with 
Mexican gold. 

The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old ; for 
the three Henrys were nearly of the same age. The first 
indications of his existence had been recognized amid the 
cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother 
had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the 
world at Pan. "Thus," said his grandfather, Henry of 
Navarre, " thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky 
child." The good king without a kingdom, taking the 
child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, 
had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and 
moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine. 
"Thus," said the grandfather again, "shall the boy be both 
merry and bold." There was something mythologically 
prophetic in the incidents of his birth. 

The best part of Navarre had been long since appropri- 
ated by Ferdinand of Aragon. In France there reigned a 
young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys. But 

* Philip II, king of Spain.— G. T. F. 



286 GREAT LEADERS. 

the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of France from 
St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon 
the motto '■'Espoir.'^'' His grandfather believed that the boy 
was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house 
of Albret, and Henry's nature seemed ever pervaded with 
Robert of Clermont's device. 

The same sensible grandfather, having different views 
on the subject of education from those manifested by 
Catharine de Medici toward her children, had the boy taught 
to run about bareheaded and barefooted, like a peasant, 
among the mountains and rocks of Beam, till he became as 
rugged as a young bear and as nimble as a kid. Black 
bread and beef and garlic were his simple fare ; and he was 
taught by his mother and his grandfather to hate lies and 
liars, and to read the Bible. 

When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out. 
Both his father and grandfather were dead. His mother, 
who had openly professed the Reformed faith since the death 
of her husband, who hated it, brought her boy to the camp 
at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the 
Huguenots. His culture was not extensive. He had learned 
to speak the truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep 
and less food. He could also construe a little Latin, and 
had read a few military treatises ; but the mighty hours of an 
eventful life were now to take him by the hand and to teach 
him much good and much evil, as they bore him onward. 
He now saw military treatises expounded practically by pro- 
fessors like his uncle Conde, and Admiral Coligny, and 
Lewis Nassau in such lecture rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, 
and Moncontour, and never was apter scholar. 

The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the 
fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois. 
The faith taught in the mountains of Beam was no buckler 
against the demand of " The mass, or death ! " thundered at 
his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to thousands 
of massacred Huguenots. Henry yielded to such conclusive 



HENRY IV, KING OF FRANCE. 287 

arguments, and became a Catholic. Four years of court- 
imprisonment succeeded, and the young king of Navarre, 
though proof to the artifices of his gossip Guise, was not 
adamant to the temptations spread for him by Catharine de 
Medici. In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre, 
many pitfalls entrapped him, and he became a stock-per- 
former in the state comedies and tragedies of that plot- 
ting age. 

A silken web of palace-politics, palace-diplomacy, palace- 
revolutions enveloped him. Schemes and counter-schemes, 
stratagems and conspiracies, assassinations and poisonings ; 
all the state machinery which worked so exquisitely in fair 
ladies' chambers, to spread havoc and desolation over a 
kingdom, were displayed before his eyes. Now cam- 
paigning with one royal brother against Huguenots, now 
fighting with another on their side, now solicited by the 
queen-mother to attempt the life of her son, now implored 
by Henry III to assassinate his brother, the Bearnese, as 
fresh antagonisms, affinities, combinations, were developed, 
detected, neutralized almost daily, became rapidly an adept 
in Medician state-chemistry. Charles IX in his grave, 
Henry III on the throne, AlenQon in the Huguenot camp — 
Henry at last made his escape. The brief war and peace 
of Mercoeur succeeded, and the king of Navarre formally 
abjured the Catholic creed. The parties were now sharjily 
defined. Guise mounted upon the League, Henry astride 
upon the Reformation, were prepared to do battle to the 
death. The temporary " war of the amorous " was followed 
by the peace of Fleix. 

Four years of peace again — four fat years of wantonness 
and riot preceding fourteen hungry, famine-stricken years 
of bloodiest civil war. The voluptuousness and infamy of 
the Louvre were almost paralleled in vice, if not in splendor, 
by the miniature court at Pau. Henry's Spartan grand- 
father would scarcely have approved the courses of the 
youth whose education he had commenced on so simple a 



^88 GREAT LEADERS, 

scale. For Margaret of Valois, hating her husband, and 
living in most undisguised and promiscuous infidelity to 
him, had profited by her mother's lessons. A seraglio of 
maids of honor ministered to Henry's pleasures, and were 
carefully instructed that the peace and war of the kingdom 
were playthings in their hands. While at Paris royalty 
was hopelessly sinking in a poisonous marsh, there was 
danger that even the hardy nature of the Bearnese would 
be mortally enervated by the atmosphere in Avhich he 
lived. 

The unhappy Henry III, baited by the Guises, worried 
by the Alen9on and his mother, implored the king of 
Navarre to return to Paris and the Catholic faith. M. de 
Segur, chief of T^avarre's council, who had been won over 
during a visit to the capital, where he had made the discovery 
that "Henry III was an angel, and his ministers devils,'* 
came back to Pan, urging his master's acceptance of the 
royal invitation. Henry wavered. Bold D'Aubigne, stanch- 
est of Huguenots and of his friends, next day privately 
showed Segur a palace window opening on a very steep 
precipice over the Bayse, and cheerfully assured him that 
he should be flung from it did he not instantly reverse 
his proceedings and give his master different advice. " If I 
am not able to do the deed myself," said D'Aubigne, " here 
are a dozen more to help me." The chief of the council 
cast a glance behind him, saw a number of grim Puritan 
soldiers, with their hats plucked down upon their brows, 
looking very serious ; so made his bow, and quite changed 
his line of conduct. 

But Henry — no longer the unsophisticated youth who 
had been used to run barefoot among the cliffs of Coarraze — 
was grown too crafty a politician to be entangled by Spanish 
or Medician wiles. The duke of Anjou was now dead. 
Of all the princes who had stood between him and the 
throne, there was none remaining save the helpless, child- 
less, superannuated youth who was its present occupant. 



HENRY IVy KING OF FRANCE. 289 

The king of Navarre was legitimate heir to the crown of 
France. " Espoir " was now in letters of light upon his 
shield, but he knew that his path to greatness led through 
manifold dangers, and that it was only at the head of his 
Huguenot chivalry that he could cut his way. He was the 
leader of the nobles of Gascony, and Dauphiny, and Guienne, 
in their mountain fastnesses ; of the weavers, cutlers, and 
artisans in their thriving manufacturing and trading towns. 
It was not Spanish gold, but carbines and cutlasses, bows 
and bills, which could bring him to the throne of his an- 
cestors. 

And thus he stood the chieftain of that great, austere 
party of Huguenots, the men who went on their knees be- 
fore the battle, beating their breasts with their iron gant- 
lets, and singing in full chorus a psalm of David before 
smiting the Philistines hip and thigh. 

Their chieftain, scarcely their representative — fit to lead 
his Puritans on the battle-field — was hardly a model for them 
elsewhere. Yet, though profligate in one respect, he was 
temperate in every other. In food, wine, and sleep, he was 
always moderate. Subtle and crafty in self-defence, he re- 
tained something of his old love of truth, of his hatred for 
liars. Hardly generous, perhaps, he was a friend of justice ; 
while economy in a wandering king like himself was a 
necessary virtue, of which France one day was to feel the 
beneficent action. Eeckless and headlong in appearance, 
he was in truth the most careful of men. On the religious 
question most cautious of all, he always left the door open 
behind him, disclaimed all bigotry of opinion, and earnestly 
implored the papists to seek, not his destruction, but his in- 
struction. Yet, prudent as he was by nature in every other 
regard, he was all his life the slave of one woman or another ; 
and it was by good luck rather than by sagacity that he 
did not repeatedly forfeit the fruits of his courage and con- 
duct in obedience to his master-passion. 

Always open to conviction on the subject of his faith, 
13 



290 GREAT LEADERS, 

lie repudiated the appellation of heretic. A creed, he said, 
was not to be changed like a shirt, but only on due deliber- 
ation and under special advice. In his secret heart he 
probably regarded the two religions as his chargers, and was 
ready to mount alternately the one or the other, as each 
seemed the more likely to bear him safely in battle. The 
Bearnese was no Puritan, but he was most true to himself 
and to his own advancement. His highest principle of ac- 
tion was to reach his goal, and to that principle he was ever 
loyal. Feeling, too, that it was for the interest of France 
that he should succeed, he was even inspired — compared 
with others on the stage — by an almost lofty patriotism. 

Amiable by nature and by habit, he had preserved the 
most unimpaired good-humor throughout the horrible years 
which succeeded St. Bartholomew, during which he carried 
his life in his hand, and learned not to wear his heart upon 
his sleeve. Without gratitude, without resentment, without 
fear, without remorse, entirely arbitrary, yet with the ca- 
pacity to use all men's judgments ; without convictions, save 
in regard to his dynastic interests, he possessed all the quali- 
ties necessary to success. He knew how to use his enemies. 
He knew how to use his friends, to abuse them, and to 
throw them away. He refused to assassinate Francis Alen- 
(jon at the bidding of Henry III, but he attempted to pro- 
cure the murder of the truest of his own friends, one of the 
noblest characters of the age, whose breast showed twelve 
scars received in his service — Agrippa D'Aubigne — because 
the honest soldier had refused to become his pimp, a serv- 
ice the king had implored upon his knees. 

Beneath the mask of perpetual, careless good-humor, 
lurked the keenest eye, a subtle, restless, widely combining 
brain, and an iron will. Native sagacity had been tempered 
into consummate elasticity by the fiery atmosphere in which 
feebler natures had been dissolved. His wit was as flashing 
and as quickly unsheathed as his sword. Desperate, appar- 
ently reckless temerity on the battle-field was deliberately 



WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND. 291 

indulged in, that the world might be brought to recognize 
a hero and chieftain in a king. The do-nothings of the 
Merovingian line had been succeeded by the Pepins ; to the 
effete Carlovingians had come a Capet; to the impotent 
Valois should come a worthier descendant of St. Louis. 
This was shrewd Gascon calculation, aided by constitutional 
fearlessness. When dispatch-writing, invisible Philips, star- 
gazing Rudolphs, and petticoated Henrys sat upon the 
thrones of Europe, it was wholesome to show the world that 
there was a king left who could move about in the bustle 
and business of the age, and could charge as well as most 
soldiers at the head of his cavalry ; that there was one more 
sovereign fit to reign over men, besides the glorious virgin 
who governed England. 

Thus courageous, crafty, far-seeing, consistent, untiring, 
imperturbable, he was born to command, and had a right to 
reign. He had need of the throne, and the throne had still 
more need of him. 



WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FMEDLAND. 

By FEIEDEICH VON SCHILLER. 

[Albrecht "Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, a distinguished Aus- 
trian general, the most noted opponent of Gustavus Adolphus in the 
Thirty Years' War, born 1583, assassinated 1634. Wallenstein had 
already achieved the most brilliant rank among the Imperialist gener- 
als, except Tilly, when the defeat of the latter made the ambitious 
soldier, whose great wealth and unscrupulous daring had excited the 
jealousy of the Emperor Ferdinand, again a necessity to the Catholic 
cause. Wallenstein, who had raised and subsisted an immense army 
at his own expense at a time of pressing imperial need, had afterward 
been retired from command. When called again to the help of the 
imperial cause, Wallenstein dictated his own terms, which practi- 
cally left Ferdinand a mere puppet in his hands. Though Gustavus 
Adolphus was victor at the battle of Liitzen, it was at the cost of his 
own life, a result welcomed by the Catholic league as a great victory. 



292 GREAT LEADERS. 

Wallenstein reorganized his army, and was again ordered by the em- 
peror to lay down his baton on the just suspicion that he was nego- 
tiating with the Swedes disloyally. His official removal was made 
known to his principal generals, and Wallenstein, deserted by a large 
portion of his troops, was assassinated by a conspiracy of his minor 
officers, who had become satisfied that it would be impracticable to 
secure his person alive, or to prevent his immediate junction with the 
advancing Swedes.] 

CouKT Wallei^stein", afterward Duke of Friedland, 
was an experienced officer, and the richest nobleman in 
Bohemia. From his earliest youth he had been in the serv- 
ice of the house of Austria, and several campaigns against 
the Turks, Venetians, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Tran- 
sylvanians had established his reputation. He was present 
as colonel at the battle of Prague, and afterward, as major- 
general, had defeated a Hungarian force in Moravia. The 
emperor's gratitude was equal to his services, and a large 
share of the confiscated estates of the Bohemian insurgents 
was their reward. Possessed of immense property, excited 
by ambitious views, confident of his own good fortune, and 
still more encouraged by the existing state of circumstances, 
he offered, at his own expense and that of his friends, to 
raise and clothe an army for the emperor, and even under- 
took the cost of maintaining it if he were allowed to aug- 
ment it to fifty thousand men. 

The project was universally ridiculed as the chimerical 
offering of a visionary brain ; but the offer was highly valu- 
able, if its promises should be but partly fulfilled. Cer- 
tain circles in Bohemia were assigned to him as depots, with 
authority to appoint his own officers. In a few months he 
had twenty thousand men under arms, with which, quitting 
the Austrian territories, he soon afterward appeared on the 
frontiers of Lower Saxony with thirty thousand. The em- 
peror had lent this armament nothing but his name. The 
reputation of the general, the prospect of rapid promotion, 
and the hope of plunder, attracted to his standard ad- 



WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND. 203 

venturers from all quarters of Germany, and even sovereign 
princes, stimulated by the desire of glory or of gain, offered 
to raise regiments for the service of Austria. 

The secret how Wallenstein had purposed to fulfill his 
extravagant designs was now manifest. He had learned the 
lesson from Count Mansfeld,* but the scholar surpassed his 
master. On the principle that war must support war, Mans- 
feld and the Duke of Brunswick had subsisted their troops 
by contributions levied indiscriminately on friend and 
enemy ; but this predatory life was attended with all the 
inconvenience and insecurity which accompany robbery. 
Like fugitive banditti, they were obliged to steal through 
exasperated and vigilant enemies; to roam from one end 
of Germany to another; to watch their opportunity with 
anxiety, and to abandon the most fertile territories whenever 
they were defended by a superior army. If Mansfeld and 
Duke Christian had done such great things in the face of 
these difficulties, what might not be expected if the obsta- 
cles were removed; when the army raised was numerous 
enough to overawe in itself the most powerful states of the 
empire ; when the name of the emperor insured impunity 
to every outrage ; and when, under the highest authority, 
and at the head of an overwhelming force, the same system 
of warfare was pursued which these two adventurers had 
hitherto adopted at their own risk, and with only an un- 
trained multitude ? 

Wallenstein was at the head of an army of nearly a hun- 
dred thousand men, who adored him, when the sentence of 
his dismissal arrived. Most of the officers were his creatures 
— with the common soldiers his hint was law. His ambi- 
tion was boundless, his pride indomitable, his imperious 
spirit could not brook an injury unavenged. One moment 
would now precipitate him from the height of grandeur 
into the obscurity of a private station. To execute such a 

* A noted Protestant general, to whom Wallenstein had been op- 
posed in more than one campaign. 



29-i GREAT LEADERS. 

sentence upon such a delinquent seemed to require more 
address than it cost to obtain it from the judge. Accord- 
ingly, two of Wallenstein's most intimate friends were 
selected as heralds of these evil tidings, and instructed to 
soften them as much as possible by flattering assurances of 
the continuance of the emperor's favor. 

Wallenstein had ascertained the purport of their mes- 
sage before the imperial ambassadors arrived. He had time 
to collect himself, and his countenance exhibited an exter- 
nal calmness while grief and rage w^ere storming in his 
bosom. He had made up his mind to obey. The empe- 
ror's decision had taken him by surprise before circum- 
stances were ripe or his preparations complete for the bold 
measures he had contemplated. His extensive estates were 
scattered over Bohemia and Moravia, and by their confisca- 
tion the emjieror might at once destroy the sinews of his 
]30wer. He looked, therefore, to the future for revenge, 
and in this hope he was encouraged by the predictions of 
an Italian astrologer, who led his imperious spirit like a 
child in leading-strings. Seni had read in the stars that 
his master's brilliant career was not yet ended, and that 
bright and glorious prospects still awaited him. It was, in- 
deed, unnecessary to consult the stars to fortell that an 
enemy, Gustavus Adolphus, would ere long render indis- 
pensable the services of such a general as Wallenstein. 

" The Emperor is betrayed," said Wallenstein to the 
messengers ; " I pity but forgive him. It is plain that the 
grasping spirit of the Bavarian dictates to him. I grieve 
that, with so much weakness, he has sacrificed me ; but I 
will obey." He dismissed the emissaries with princely 
presents, and, in a humble letter, besought the continuance 
of the emperor's favor and of the dignities he had bestowed 
upon him. 

The murmurs of the army were universal on hearing of 
the dismissal of their general, and the greater part of his 
officers immediately quitted the imperial service. Many 



WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND. 295 

followed liim to his estates in Bohemia and Moravia ; others 
he attached to his interests by pensions, in order to com- 
mand their services when the opportunity should offer. 

But repose was the last thing that Walenstein contem- 
plated when he returned to private life. In his retreat he 
surrounded himself with a regal pomp which seemed to 
mock the sentence of degradation. Six gates led to the 
palace he inhabited in Prague, and a hundred houses were 
pulled down to make way for his courtyard. Similar pal- 
aces were built on his other numerous estates. Gentlemen 
of the noblest houses contended for the honor of serving 
him, and even imperial chamberlains resigned the golden 
key to the emperor to fill a similar office under Wallenstein. 
lie maintained sixty pages, who were instructed by the 
ablest masters. His antechamber was protected by fifty 
life-guards. His table never consisted of less than one hun- 
dred covers, and his seneschal was a person of distinction. 
When he traveled his baggage and suite accompanied him 
in a hundred wagons drawn by six or four horses ; his court 
followed in sixty carriages attended by fifty led horses. The 
pomp of his liveries, the splendor of his equipages, and the 
decorations of his apartments were in keeping with all the 
rest. Six barons and as many knights were in constant 
attendance about his person, and ready to execute his slight- 
est order. Twelve patrols went their rounds about his pal- 
ace to prevent any disturbance. His busy genius required 
silence. The noise of coaches was to be kept away from his 
residence, and the streets leading to it were frequently 
blocked up with chains. His own circle was as silent as the 
approaches to his palace. Dark, reserved, and impenetrable, 
he was more sparing of his words than of his gifts, while 
the little that he spoke was harsh and imperious. He never 
smiled, and the coldness of his temperament was proof 
against sensual seductions. 

Ever occupied with grand schemes, he despised all those 
idle amusements in which so many waste their lives. The 



296 GREAT LEADERS. 

correspondence he kept up with the whole of Europe was 
chiefly managed by himself, and, that as little as possible 
might be trusted to the silence of others, most of the letters 
were written by his own hand. He was a man of large stat- 
ure, thin, of a sallow complexion, with short, red hair, and 
small, sparkling eyes. A gloomy and forbidding seriousness 
sat upon his brow, and his magnificent presents alone retained 
the trembling crowd of his dependents. 

In this stately obscurity did Wallenstein silently but not 
inactively await the hour of revenge. The victorious career 
of Gustavus Adolphus soon gave him a presentiment of its 
approach. Not one of his lofty schemes had been aban- 
doned, and the emperor's ingratitude had loosened the curb 
of his ambition. The dazzling splendor of his private life 
bespoke high soaring projects, and, lavish as a king, he 
seemed already to reckon among his certain possessions 
those which he contemplated with hope. 

Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, terminated his active 
and extraordinary life. To ambition he owed both his 
greatness and his ruin. With all his failings he possessed 
great and admirable qualities; and, had he kept himself 
within due bounds, he would have lived and died without 
an equal. The virtues of the ruler and of the hero — pru- 
dence, justice, firmness, and courage — are strikingly promi- 
nent features in his character ; but he wanted the gentler 
virtues of the man, which adorn the hero and make the 
ruler beloved. Terror was the talisman with which he 
worked ; extreme in his punishments as in his rewards, he 
knew how to keep alive the zeal of his followers, while no 
general of ancient or modern times could boast of being 
obeyed with equal alacrity. Submission to his will was 
more prized by him than bravery ; for, if the soldiers work 
by the latter, it is on the former that the general depends. 
He continually kept up the obedience of his troops by 
capricious orders, and profusely rewarded the readiness to 
obey even trifles, because he looked rather to the act itself 



WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF ERIE DL AND. 297 

than its object. He once issued a decree, with the penalty 
of death on disobedience, that none but red sashes should 
be worn in the army. A captain of horse no sooner heard 
the order, than, pulling off his gold-embroidered sash, he 
trampled it under foot. Wallenstein, on being informed of 
the circumstance, promoted him on the spot to the rank of 
colonel. 

His comprehensive glance was always directed to the 
whole, and in all hid apparent caprice, he steadily kept in 
view some general scope or bearing. The robberies com- 
mitted by the soldiers in a friendly country had led to the 
severest orders against marauders ; and all who should be 
caught thieving were threatened with the halter. Wallen- 
stein himself having met a straggler in the open country 
upon the field, commanded him to be seized without trial, as 
a transgressor of the law, and, in his usual voice of thunder, 
exclaimed, " Hang the fellow," against which no opposition 
ever availed. The soldier pleaded and proved his innocence, 
but the irrevocable sentence had gone forth. " Hang, then, 
innocent," cried the inexorable Wallenstein, "the guilty 
will have then more reason to tremble." Preparations were 
already making to execute the sentence, when the soldier, 
who gave himself up for lost, formed the desperate resolution 
of not dying without revenge. He fell furiously upon his 
judge, but was overpowered by numbers and disarmed be- 
fore he could fulfil his design. " Now let him go," said the 
duke, " it will excite sufficient terror." 

His munificence was supported by an immense income, 
which was estimated at three millions of florins yearly, witli- 
out reckoning the enormous sums which he raised under the 
name of contributions. His liberality and clearness of under- 
standing raised him above the religious prejudices of his 
age; and the Jesuits never forgave him for having seen 
through their system, and for regarding the pope as nothing 
more than a bishop of Kome. 

But as no one ever yet came to a fortunate end who 



298 GREAT LEADERS, 

quarrelled with the Church, Wallenstein, also, must augment 
the number of its yictims. Through the intrigues of monks, 
he lost at Ratisbon the command of the army, and at Egra 
his life ; by the same arts, perhaps, he lost what was of more 
consequence, his honorable name and good repute with pos- 
terity. 

For, in justice, it must be admitted that the pens which 
have traced the history of this extraordinary man are not 
untinged with partiality, and that the treachery of the duke, 
and his designs upon the throne of Bohemia, rest not so 
much upon proved facts, as upon probable conjecture. No 
documents have yet been brought to light which disclose 
with historical certainty the secret motives of his conduct ; 
and among all his public and well-attested actions, there is, 
perhaps, not one which could have had an innocent end. 
Many of his most obnoxious measures proved nothing but 
the earnest wish he entertained for peace; most of the 
others are explained and justified by the well-founded dis- 
trust he entertained of the emperor, and the excusable wish 
of maintaining his -own importance. ■ It is true, that his 
conduct toward the Elector of Bavaria looks too like an un- 
worthy revenge, and the dictates of an implacable spirit ; 
but still, none of his actions perhaps warrant us in holding 
his treason to be proved. If necessity and despair at last 
forced him to deserve the sentence which had been pro- 
nounced against him while innocent, still this will not 
justify that sentence. Thus Wallenstein fell, not because 
he was a rebel, but he became a rebel because he fell. Un- 
fortunate in life that he made a victorious party his enemy, 
but still more unfortunate in death, that the same party 
survived him and wrote his history. 




CARDINAL RICHELIEU. 



CARDINAL RICHELIEU, 209 

CAKDINAL EICHELIEU. 

By Sib JAMES STEPHEN. 

[Armand Jean Duplessis, Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu, born 
1585, died 1643. Originally trained to arms, as Marquis du Chillon, he 
decided to take orders, studied theology and was made Bishop of 
Lugon in 1607. During the minority of Louis XIII he enjoyed the 
confidence of the queen regent, Maria de' Medici, and in 1622 received 
the cardinal's hat. In spite of the dislike of the king he became prime 
minister and practically ruled France till his death. Though a prince 
of the Church, Richelieu secretly assisted the parliamentary party in 
the English Revolution of 1640 ; and gave most important assistance 
both in money and armies, as a matter of state policy, to the Protestants 
during the Thirty Years' War.] 

Richelieu was one of the rulers of mankind in virtue of 
an inherent and indefeasible birthright. His title to command 
rested on that sublime force of will and decision of character 
by which, in an age of great men, he was raised above them 
all. It is a gift which supposes and requires in him on 
whom it is conferred convictions too firm to be shaken by 
the discovery of any unperceived or unheeded truths. It is, 
therefore, a gift which, when bestowed on the governors of 
nations, also presupposes in them the patience to investigate, 
the capacity to comprehend, and the genius to combine, all 
those views of the national interest, under the guidance of 
which their inflexible policy is to be conducted to its destined 
consummation ; for the stoutest hearted men, if acting in 
ignorance, or under the impulse of haste or of error, must 
often pause, often hesitate, and not seldom recede. Riche- 
lieu was exposed to no such danger. He moved onward to 
his predetermined ends with that unfaltering step which 
attests, not merely a stern immutability of purpose, but a 
comprehensive survey of the path to be trodden, and a pro- 
found acquaintance with all its difficulties and all its re- 
sources. It was a path from which he could be turned 



300 GREAT LEADERS. 

aside neither by his bad nor by his good genius ; neither by 
fear, lassitude, interest, nor pleasure ; nor by justice, pity, 
humanity, nor conscience. 

The idolatrous homage of mere mental power, without 
reference to the motives by which it is governed, or to the 
ends to which it is addressed — that blind hero-worship, 
which would place Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus on 
the same level, and extol with equal warmth the triumphs of 
Cromwell and of Washington, though it be a modern fash- 
ion, has certainly not the charm of novelty. On the con- 
trary, it might, in the language of the Puritans, be described 
as one of the " old follies of the old Adam " ; and to the 
influence of that folly the reputation of Eichelieu is not a 
little indebted. 

In his estimate, the absolute dominion of the French 
crown and the grandeur of France were convertible terms. 
They seemed to him but as two different aspects of the great 
consummation to which every hour of his political life was 
devoted. In approaching that ultimate goal, there were to 
be surmounted many obstacles which he distinctly perceived, 
and of which he has given a very clear summary in his 
*' Testament Politique." " When it pleased your majesty," 
he says, " to give me not only a place in your council, but a 
great share in the conduct of your affairs, the Huguenots 
divided the state with you. The great lords were acting, 
not as your subjects, but as independent chieftains. The 
governors of your provinces were conducting themselves 
like so many sovereign princes. Foreign affairs and alli- 
ances were disregarded. The interest of the public was 
postponed to that of private men. In a word, your authority 
was, at that time so torn to shreds, and so unlike what it 
ought to be, that, in the confusion, it was impossible to 
recognize the genuine traces of j^our royal power." 

Before his death, Eichelieu had triumphed over all these 
enemies, and had elevated the house of Bourbon upon their 
ruins. He is, I believe, the only human being who ever 



CARDISAL RICHELIEV. 301 

conceived and executed, in the spirit of philosophy, the 
design of erecting a political despotism; not, indeed a 
despotism like that of Constantinople or Teheran, but a 
power which, being restrained by religion, by learning, and 
by public spirit, was to be exempted from all other restraints ; 
a dynasty which, like a kind of subordinate providence, was 
to spread wide its arms for the guidance and shelter of the 
subject multitude, itself the while inhabiting a region too 
lofty to be ever darkened by the mists of human weakness 
or of human corruption. 

To devise schemes worthy of the academies of Laputa, 
and to pursue them with all the relentless perseverance of 
Cortes or of Clive, has been characteristic of many of the 
statesmen of France, both in remote and in recent times. 
Eichelieu was but a more successful Mirabeau. He was not 
so much a minister as a dictator. He was rather the deposi- 
tary than the agent of the royal power. A kin^ in all things 
but the name, he reigned with that exemption from hereditary 
and domestic influences which has so often imparted to the 
papal monarchs a kind of preterhuman energy, and has so 
often taught the world to deprecate the celibacy of the throne. 

Eichelieu was the heir of the designs of Henry IV, and 
the ancestor of those of Louis XIY. But they courted, and 
were sustained by, the applause and the attachment of their 
subjects. He passed his life in one unintermitted struggle 
with each, in turn, of the powerful bodies over which he 
ruled. By a long series of well-directed blows, he crushed 
forever the political and military strength of the Huguenots. 
By his strong hand, the sovereign courts were confined to 
their judicial duties, and their claims to participate in the 
government of the state were scattered to the winds. Tram- 
pling under foot all rules of judicial procedure and the clear- 
est principles of justice, he brought to the scaffold one after 
another of the proudest nobles of France, by sentences dic- 
tated by himself to extraordinary judges of his own selec- 
tion ; thus teaching the doctrine of social equality by lessons 



302 GREAT LEADERS. 

too impressive to be misinterpreted or forgotten by any later 
generation. Both the privileges, in exchange for which the 
greater fiefs had surrendered their independence, and the 
franchises, for the conquest of which the cities, in earlier 
times, had successfully contended, were alike swept away by 
this remorseless innovator. He exiled the mother, oppressed 
the wife, degraded the brother, banished the confessor, and 
put to death the kinsmen and favorites of the king, and 
compelled the king himself to be the instrument of these 
domestic severities. Though surrounded by enemies and by 
rivals, his power ended only with his life. Though beset by 
assassins, he died in the ordinary course of nature. Though 
he had waded to dominion through slaughter, cruelty, and 
wrong, he passed to his great account amid the applause of 
the people, with the benedictions of the Church ; and, as 
far as any human being ever could perceive, in hope, in 
tranquility, and in peace. 

What, then, is the reason why so tumultuous a career 
reached at length so serene a close ? The reason is that, 
amid all his conflicts, Eichelieu wisely and successfully 
maintained three powerful alliances. He cultivated the at- 
tachment of men of letters, the favor of the commons, and 
the sympathy of all French idolaters of the national glory. 

He was a man of extensive, if not of profound, learning, 
a theologian of some account, and an aspirant for fame as a 
dramatist, a wit, a poet, and a historian. But if his claims 
to admiration as a writer were disputable, none contended 
his title to applause as a patron of literature and of art. 
The founder of a despotism in the world of politics, he as- 
pired also to be the founder of a commonwealth in the world 
of letters. While crushing the national liberties, he founded 
the French Academy as the sacred shrine of intellectual 
freedom and independence. Acknowledging no equal in 
the state, he forbade the acknowledgment, in that literary 
republic, of any superiority save that of genius. While re- 
fusing to bare his head to any earthly potentate, he would 



GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN. 303 

permit no eminent author to stand bareheaded in his pres- 
ence. By these cheap and not dishonest arts, he gained an 
inestimable advantage. The honors he conferred on the 
men of learning of his age they largely repaid, by placing 
under his control the main-springs of public opinion. 

To conciliate the commons of France, Richelieu even 
ostentatiously divested himself of every prejudice hostile to 
his popularity. A prince of the Church of Rome, he cher- 
ished the independence of the Galilean Church and clergy. 
The conqueror of the Calvinists, he yet respected the rights 
of conscience. Of noble birth and ancestry, his demeanor 
was still that of a tribune of the people. But it was not by de- 
meanor alone that he labored to win their regard. He affected 
the more solid praise of large and salutary reformations. 



GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF 
SWEDEN. 

By FRIEDEICH VON SCHILLEE. 

[Known as the Protector of the Protestant Faith, the most brill- 
iant hero of the Thirty Years' War, and one of the greatest soldiers of 
modern times, born 1594, killed at the battle of Lutzen, 1633. In 1630, 
the Swedish king having satisfactorily disposed of the various national 
difficulties which had so far embarrassed his career, threw the weight 
of his gantlet into the struggle going on between the Catholic league, 
headed by Ferdinand of Austria, and the Protestant princes of Ger- 
many. The great genius of Gustavus Adolphus, who taught an en- 
tirely new system of tactics, made him irresistible, and in two years he 
firmly established a Protestant ascendancy in German affairs which 
no power afterward could break. Wallenstein was his most brilliant 
antagonist. After the death of the Swedish hero, the generals who 
had been trained in his school continued the war with various vicissi- 
tudes till peace was declared, substantially granting the rights for 
"which the Protestant chieftains had been fighting.] 

Gustavus Adolphus had not completed his seventeenth 
year when the Swedish throne became vacant by the death 
of his father ; but the early maturity of his genius enabled 



304 GREAT LEADERS. 

the Estates to abridge in his favor the legal period of mi- 
nority. With a glorious conquest over himself, he com- 
menced a reign which was to have victory for its constant 
attendant — a career which was to begin and end in success. 
The young Countess of Brahe, the daughter of a subject, 
had gained his early affections, and he had resolved to share 
with her the Swedish throne ; but, constrained by time and 
circumstances, he made his attachment yield to the higher 
duties of a king, and heroism again took exclusive posses- 
sion of a heart which was not destined by nature to con- 
fine itself within the limits of quiet domestic happiness. 

Christian IV of Denmark, who ascended the throne be- 
fore the birth of Gustavus, in an inroad upon Sweden, had 
gained some considerable advantages over the father of that 
hero. Gustavus Adolphus hastened to put an end to this 
destructive war, and, by prudent sacrifices, obtained a peace 
in order to turn his arms against the czar of Muscovy. 
The questionable fame of a conqueror never tempted him 
to spend the blood of his subjects in unjust wars ; but he 
never shrunk from a just one. His arms were successful 
against Eussia, and Sweden was augmented by several im- 
portant provinces on the east. 

In the meantime, Sigismund of Poland retained against 
the son the same sentiments of hostility which the father 
had provoked, and left no artifice untried to shake the alle- 
giance of his subjects, to cool the ardor of his friends, and 
to embitter his enemies. Neither the great qualities of his 
rival, nor the repeated proofs of devotion which Sweden 
gave to her loved monarch, could extinguish in this infatu- 
ated prince the foolish hope of regaining his lost throne. 
All Gustavus's overtures were haughtily rejected. Unwill- 
ingly was this really peaceful king involved in a tedious war 
with Poland, in which the whole of Livonia and Polish 
Prussia were successively conquered. Though constantly 
victorious, Gustavus Adolphus was always the first to hold 
out the hand of peace. 



GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN. 305 

After the unsuccessful attempt of the king of Denmark 
to check the emperor's * progress, Gustavus Adolphus was 
the only prince in Europe to whom oppressed liberty could 
look for protection — the only one who, while he was per- 
sonally qualified to conduct such an enterprise, had both 
political motives to recommend and wrongs to justify it. 
Before the commencement of the war in Lower Saxony, im- 
portant political interests induced him, as well as the king 
of Denmark, to offer his services and his army for the de- 
fense of Germany ; but the offer of the latter had, to his 
own misfortune, been preferred. Since that time Wallen- 
stein and the emperor had adopted measures which must 
have been equally offensive to him as a man and as a king. 
Imperial troops had been dispatched to the aid of the Polish 
king, Sigismund, to defend Prussia against the Swedes. 
When the king complained to Wallenstein of this act of 
hostility, he received for answer, " The emperor has more 
soldiers than he wants for himself; he must help his 
friends." The Swedish ambassadors had been insolently 
ordered by Wallenstein to withdraw from the conference at 
Lubeck; and when, una wed by this command, they were 
courageous enough to remain, contrary to the law of nations, 
he had threatened them with violence. 

Ferdinand had also insulted the Swedish flag, and inter- 
cepted the king's dispatches to Transylvania. He also 
threw every obstacle in the way of a peace between Poland 
and Sweden, supported the pretensions of Sigismund to the 
Swedish throne, and denied the right of Gustavus to the 
title of king. Deigning no regard to the repeated remon- 
strances of Gustavus, he rather aggravated the offence by 
new grievances than conceded the required satisfaction. 

So many personal motives, supported by important con- 
siderations, both of policy and religion, and seconded by 

* Ferdinand of Austria, the head of the Catholic League of Ger- 
many and Spain, by whom the Thirty Years' War was inaugurated.— 
G. T. F. 



306 GEE AT LEADERS. 

pressing invitations from Germany, had their full weight 
with a prince who was naturally the more jealous of his 
royal prerogative the more it was questioned, who was flat- 
tered by the glory he hoped to gain as Protector of the 
Oppressed, and passionately loved war as the element of his 
genius. 

But the strongest pledge for the success of his under- 
taking Gustavus found in himself. Prudence demanded 
that he should embrace all the foreign assistance he could, 
in order to guard his enterprise from the imputation of 
rashness ; but all his confidence and courage were entirely 
derived from himself. He was indisputably the greatest 
general of his age, and the bravest soldier in the army 
which he had formed. Familiar with the tactics of Greece and 
Rome, he had discovered a more effective system of warfare, 
which was adopted as a model by the most eminent com- 
manders of subsequent times. He reduced the unwieldly 
squadrons of cavalry, and rendered their movements more 
light and rapid ; and, with the same view, he widened the 
intervals between his battalions. Instead of the usual array 
in a single line, he disposed his forces in two lines, that 
the second might advance in the event of the first giving 
way. 

He made up for his want of cavalry, by placing infantry 
among the horse ; a practice which frequently decided the 
victory. Europe first learned from him the importance of 
infantry. All Germany was astonished at the strict dis- 
cipline which, at the first, so creditably distinguished the 
Swedish army within their territories; all disorders were 
punished with the utmost severity — particularly impiety, 
theft, gambling, and duelling. The Swedish articles of war 
enforced frugality. In the camp, the king's tent not ex- 
cepted, neither silver nor gold was to be seen. The general's 
eye looked as vigilantly to the morals as to the martial 
bravery of his soldiers ; every regiment was ordered to form 
round its chaplain for morning and evening prayers. In all 



/• 

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN. 307 

these points the lawgiver was also an example. A sincere 
and ardent piety exalted his courage. Equally free from 
the coarse infidelity which leaves the passions of the bar- 
barian without control ; and from the grovelling supersti- 
tion of Ferdinand, who humbled himself to the dust before 
the Supreme Being, while he haughtily trampled on his fel- 
low creature — in the height of his success he was ever a man 
and a Christian ; in the height of his devotion a king and 
a hero. 

The hardships of war he shared with the meanest soldier 
in his army; maintained a calm serenity amid the hot- 
test fury of battle ; his glance was omnipresent, and he in- 
trepidly forgot the danger while he exposed himself to the 
greatest peril. His natural courage, indeed, too often made 
him forget the duty of a general ; and the life of a king 
ended in the death of a common soldier. But such a leader 
was followed to victory alike by the coward and the brave, 
and his eagle glance marked every heroic deed which his 
example had inspu^ed. The fame of their sovereign ex- 
cited in the nation an enthusiastic sense of their own im- 
portance ; proud of their king, the peasant in Finland and 
Gothland joyfully contributed his pittance; the soldier 
willingly shed his blood ; and the lofty energy which his 
single mind had imparted to the nation long survived its 
creator. 

If Gustavus Adolphus owed his successes chiefly to his 
own genius, at the same time, it must be owned, he was 
greatly favored by fortune and by circumstance. Two great 
advantages gave him a decided superiority over the enemy. 
While he removed the scene of war into the lands of the 
League, drew their youths as recruits, enriched himself with 
booty, and used the revenue of their fugitive princes as his 
own, he at once took from the enemy the means of effectual 
resistance, and maintained an expensive war with little cost 
to himself. And, moreover, while his opponents, the princes 
of the League, divided among themselves, and governed by 



308 GREAT LEADERS. 

different and conflicting interests, acted without unanimity, 
and therefore without energy ; while the generals were de- 
ficient in authority, their troops in obedience, the operations 
of their scattered armies without concert ; while the general 
was separated from the lawgiver and the statesman ; these 
several functions were united in Gustavus Adolphus, the 
only source from which authority flowed, the sole object to 
which the eye of the warrior turned ; the soul of his party, 
the inventor as well as the executor of his plans. In him, 
therefore, the Protestants had a center of unity and har- 
mony, which was altogether wanting to their opponents. 
No wonder, then, if favored by such advantages, at the head 
of such an army, with such a genius to direct it, and 
guided by such political prudence, Gustavus Adolphus was 
irresistible 

With the sword in one hand, and mercy in the other, he 
traversed Germany as a conqueror, a lawgiver, and a judge, 
in as short a time almost as the tourist of pleasure. The 
keys of towers and fortresses were delivered to him, as if 
to a native sovereign. No fortress was inaccessible ; no river 
checked his victorious career. He conquered by the very 
terror of his name. 

History, too often confined to the ungrateful task of 
analyzing the uniform play of human passions, is occasionally 
rewarded by the appearance of events which strike like a 
hand from heaven into the nicely adjusted machinery of 
human plans, and carry the contemplative mind to a higher 
order of things. Of this kind, is the sudden retirement of 
Gustavus Adolphus from the scene ; stopping for a time the 
whole movement of the political machine, and disappointing 
all the calculations of human prudence. Yesterday, the 
very soul, the great and animating principle of his own cre- 
ation ; to-day struck unpitiably to the ground in the very 
midst of his eagle flight ; untimely torn from a whole world 
of great designs, and from the ripening harvest of his ex- 
pectations, he left his bereaved party disconsolate ; and the 



I 



OUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, KING OF SWEDEN. 309 

proud edifice of his past greatness sank into ruins. The 
Protestant party had identified its hopes with its invincible 
leader, and scarcely can it now separate them from him ; 
with him, they now fear all good fortune is buried. But it 
was no longer the benefactor of Germany who fell at Lut- 
zen ; the beneficent part of his career, Gustavus Adolphus 
had already terminated ; and now the greatest service which 
he could render to the liberties of Germany was — to die. 

The ambition of the Swedish monarch aspired unques- 
tionably to establish a power within Germany, and to attain 
a firm footing in the center of the empire, which was incon- 
sistent with the liberties of the Estates. His aim was the 
imperial crown ; and this dignity, supported by his power, 
and maintained by his energy and activity, would in his 
hands be liable to more abuse than had ever been feared 
from the House of Austria. Born in a foreign country, 
educated in the maxims of arbitrary power, and by princi- 
ples and enthusiasm a determined enemy to popery, he was 
ill qualified to maintain inviolate the constitution of the 
German States, or to respect their liberties. The coercive 
homage which Augsburg, wdth many other cities, was forced 
to pay to the Swedish crown, bespoke the conqueror, rather 
than the protector of the empire ; and this town, prouder of 
the title of a royal city than of the higher dignity of the 
freedom of the empire, flattered itself with the antici|)ation 
of becoming the capital of his future kingdom. 

His ill-disguised attempts upon the Electorate of Mentz, 
which he first intended to bestow upon the Elector of Bran- 
denburg, as the dower of his daughter Christina, and after- 
ward destined for his chancellor and friend Oxenstiern, 
evinced plainly what liberties he was disposed to take with 
the constitution of the empire. His allies, the Protestant 
princes, had claims on his gratitude, which could be satis- 
fied only at the expense of their Eoman Catholic neighbors, 
and particularly of the immediate Ecclesiastical Chapters ; 
and it seems probable a j)lan was early formed for dividing 



310 GREAT LEADERS. 

the conquered provinces (after the precedent of the bar- 
barian hordes who overran the German empire) as a com- 
mon spoil, among the German and Swedish confederates. 
In his treatment of the Elector Palatine, he entirely belied 
the magnanimity of the hero, and forgot the sacred charac- 
ter of a protector. The Palatinate was in his hands, and 
the obligations both of justice and honor demanded its full 
and immediate restoration to the legitimate sovereign. But, 
by a subtlety unworthy of a great mind, and disgraceful to 
the honorable title of protector of the oppressed, he eluded 
that obligation. He treated the Palatinate as a conquest 
wrested from the enemy, and thought that this circumstance 
gave him a right to deal with it as he pleased. He surren- 
dered it to the Elector as a favor, not as a debt ; and that, 
too, as a Swedish fief, fettered by conditions which dimin- 
ished half its value, and degraded this unfortunate prince 
into a humble vassal of Sweden. One of these conditions 
obliged the Elector, after the conclusion of the war, to fur- 
nish, along with the other princes, his contribution toward 
the maintenance of the Swedish army — a condition which 
plainly indicates the fate which, in the event of the ultimate 
success of the king, awaited Germany. His sudden disap- 
pearance secured the liberties of Germany, and saved his 
reputation, while it probably spared him the mortification 
of seeing his own allies in arms against him, and all the 
fruits of his victories torn from him by a disadvantageous 
peace. 

EAKL OF STRAFFOED. 

By DAVID HUME. 

[Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, born 1593, executed 1641. 
At first a leading member of the opposition to Charles I in Parliament, 
he afterward joined the court party and became successively Viscount 
Wentworth and Earl of Strafford. As governor of Ireland, he organ- 
ized the first standing army in English annals ; and afterward formu- 



EARL OF STEAFFORB. 311 

lated the policy of " Thorough " — an executive system which would 
have made Charles an absolute monarch, free of parliamentary or other 
shackles. His remarkable political genius inspired such dread that 
Parliament looked on his death as essential to their cause. He was 
impeached as a traitor, an indictment undoubtedly true, but which 
could not be legally proved. lie was finally condemned by a bill of 
attainder. The worst blot on Charles I is that he should have yielded 
up Strafford to his foes with hardly a struggle. Though traitor to his 
country, he was the most loyal and devoted of servants to his king. 
Hume's estimate of Strafford is more lenient than that of other his- 
torians.] 

I]S" the former situation of the English Government, 
wlien the sovereign was in a great measure independent of 
his subjects, the king chose his ministers either from per- 
sonal favor, or from an opinion of their abilities, without 
any regard to their parliamentary interest or talents. It 
has since been the maxim of princes, wherever popular lead- 
ers encroach too much on royal authority, to confer offices 
on them, in expectation that they will afterward become 
more careful not to diminish that power which has become 
their own. These politics were now embraced by Charles ; 
a sure proof that a secret revolution had happened in the 
constitution, and had necessitated the prince to adopt new 
maxims of government. But the views of the king were at 
this time so repugnant to those of the Puritans that the 
leaders whom he gained lost from that moment all interest 
with their party, and were even pursued as traitors with 
implacable hatred and resentment. 

This was the case with Sir Thomas Wentworth, whom 
the king created first a baron, then a viscount, and after- 
ward Earl of Strafford ; made him president of the council 
of York, and deputy of Ireland ; and regarded him as his 
chief minister and counsellor. By his eminent talents and 
abilities Strafford merited all the confidence which his mas- 
ter reposed in him ; his character was stately and austere 
— more fitted to procure esteem than love ; his fidelity to 
the king was unshaken ; but as he now employed all his 



312 GREAT LEADERS. 

counsels to support the prerogative, which he had formerly 
bent all his endeavors to diminish, his virtue seems not to 
have been entirely pure, but to have been suscej)tible of 
strong impressions from private interest and ambition. 

The death of Strafford was too important a stroke of 
party to be left unattempted by any expedient however extra- 
ordinary. Besides the great genius and authority of that 
minister, he had threatened some of the popular leaders 
with an impeachment ; and had he not himself been sud- 
denly prevented by the impeachment of the Commons, he 
had, that very day, it was thought, charged Pym, Hambden, 
and others with treason for having invited the Scots to 
invade England. A bill of attainder was, therefore, brought 
into the Lower House immediately after finishing these 
pleadings ; and preparatory to it a new proof of the earl's 
guilt was produced, in order to remove such scruples as 
might be entertained with regard to a method of proceeding 
so unusual and irregular. 

Sir Henry Vane, secretary, had taken some notes of a 
debate in council after the dissolution of the last Parlia- 
ment ; and being at a distance, he had sent the keys of his 
cabinet, as was pretended, to his son. Sir Henry, in order to 
search for some papers, which were necessary for complet- 
ing a marriage settlement. Young Vane, falling upon this 
paper of notes, deemed the matter of the utmost import- 
ance, and immediately communicated it to Pym, who now 
produced the paper before the House of Commons. The 
question before the council was, offensive or defensive war 
with the Scots. The king proposes this difficulty, "But 
how can I undertake offensive war, if I have no more 
money?" The answer ascribed to Strafford was in these 
words : " Borrow of the city a hundred thousand pounds ; 
go on vigorously to levy ship-money. Your majesty having 
tried the affections of your people, you are absolved and 
loose from all rules of government, and may do what power 
will admit. Your majesty, having tried all ways, shall be 



EARL OF STRAFFORD. 313 

ficquittcd before God and man. And you have an army in 
Ireland, whicli you may employ to reduce this kingdom to 
obedience ; for I am confident the Scots can not hold out 
five months." There followed some counsels of Laud and 
Cottington, equally violent, with regard to the king's being 
absolved from all rules of government. 

The evidence of Secretary Vane, though exposed to such 
insurmountable objections, was the real cause of Strafford's 
unhappy fate, and made the bill of attainder pass the Com- 
mons with no greater opposition than that of fifty-nine 
dissenting votes. But there remained two other branches 
of the legislature, the king and the lords, whose assent was 
requisite ; and these, if left to their free judgment, it was 
easily foreseen, would reject the bill without scruple or de- 
liberation. To overcome this difficulty, the popular leaders 
employed expedients, for which they were beholden j^artly 
to their own industry, partly to the indiscretion of their 
adversaries. 

Strafford, in passing from his apartment to Tower Hill, 
where the scaffold was erected, stopped under Laud's win- 
dows, with whom he had long lived in intimate friendship, 
and entreated the assistance of his prayers in those awful 
moments which were approaching. The aged primate dis- 
solved in tears; and having pronounced, with a broken 
voice, a tender blessing on his departing friend, sank into 
the arms of his attendants. Strafford, still superior to his 
fate, moved on with an elated countenance, and with an air 
even of greater dignity than what usually attended him. 
He wanted that consolation which commonly supports those 
who perish by the stroke of injustice and oppression ; he was 
not buoyed up by glory, nor by the affectionate compassion 
of the spectators. Yet his mind, erect and undaunted, 
found resources within itself, and maintained its unbroken 
resolution amid the terrors of death and the triumphant 
exultations of his misguided enemies. His discourse on the 
scaffold was full of decency and courage. " He feared," he 
14 



314 GREAT LEADERS. 

said, " that the omen was bad for the intended reformation 
of the state, that it commenced with tlie shedding of inno- 
cent blood." 

Having bid a last adieu to his brother and friends who 
attending him, and having sent a blessing to his nearer rela- 
tions who were absent — " And now," said he, " I have nigh 
done ! One stroke will make my wife a widow, my dear 
children fatherless, deprive my poor servants of their in- 
dulgent master, and separate me from my affectionate 
brother and all my friends ! But let God be to you and 
them all in all ! " Going to disrobe and prepare himself 
for the block, " I thank God," said he, " that I am nowise 
afraid of death, nor am daunted with any terrors ; but do 
as cheerfully lay down my head at this time, as ever I did 
when going to repose ! " With one blow was a period put 
to his life by the executioner. 

Thus perished, in the forty-ninth year of his age, the 
Earl of Strafford, one of the most eminent personages that 
has appeared in England. Though his death was loudly 
demanded as a satisfaction to justice, and an atonement for 
the many violations of the constitution, it may safely be 
affirmed that the sentence by which he fell was an enormity 
greater than the worst of those which his implacable ene- 
mies prosecuted with so much cruel industry. The people 
in their rage had totally mistaken the proper object of their 
resentment. All the necessities, or more properly speaking, 
the difficulties, by which the king had been induced to use 
violent expedients for raising supply were the result of 
measures previous to Strafford's favor ; and if they arose 
from ill conduct, he, at least, was entirely innocent. 

Even those violent expedients themselves, which occa- 
sioned the complaint that the constitution was subverted, 
had been all of them conducted, so far as appeared, without 
his counsel or assistance. And whatever his private advice 
might be, this salutary maxim he failed not, often and pub- 
licly, to inculcate in the king's presence, that if any inevi- 




OLIVER CROMWELL. 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 316 

table necessity ever obliged tlie sovereign to violate the 
laws, this license ought to be practiced with extreme reserve, 
and as soon as possible a just atonement be made to the 
constitution for any injury which it might sustain from 
such dangerous precedents. The first Parliament after the 
restoration reversed the bill of attainder ; and even a few 
weeks after Strafford's execution this very Parliament re- 
mitted to his children the more severe consequences of his 
sentence, as if conscious of the violence with which the 
prosecution had been conducted. 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

[Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, and leader of the 
Revolution of 1640, born 1599, died 1658. Descended from a good 
race, connected with some of the best families in England, he became 
identified with the Puritan cause in the contest with King Charles I. 
He took active part in hostilities from the first, formed the famous 
Ironsides, and reorganized the parliamentary army, of which he soon 
became the chief general. lie was active in the formation of the High 
Commission, which tried and condemned the king, and thenceforward 
was the ruler of England. It was not till 1651, however, that he be- 
came the titular Lord Protector, and reorganized the government 
mainly on the lines of monarchy.] 

The soul of his party was Oliver Cromwell. Bred to 
peaceful occupations, he had, at more than forty years of 
age, accepted a commission in the parliamentary army. He 
saw precisely where the strength of the Royalists lay, and 
by what means alone that strength could be overpowered. 
He saw that it was necessary to reconstruct the army of the 
Parliament. He saw also that there were abundant and ex- 
cellent materials for the purpose, materials less showy, in- 
deed, but more solid, than those of which the gallant squad- 
rons of the king were composed. It was necessary to look 



316 . GREAT LEADERS. 

for recruits who were not mere mercenaries, for recruits of 
decent station and grave cliaracter, fearing God and zealous 
for public liberty. With such men he filled his own regi- 
ment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more 
rigid than had ever before been known in England, he ad- 
ministered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants 
of fearful potency. Cromwell made haste to organize the 
whole army on the same principles on which he had organ- 
ized his own regiment. As soon as this process was com- 
plete, the event of the war was decided. The Cavaliers had 
now to encounter natural courage equal to their own, enthu- 
siasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as was 
utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that 
the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different 
breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the 
first great encounter between the Eoyalists and the remod- 
eled army of the Houses. The victory of the Eoundheads 
was complete and decisive. It was followed by other tri- 
umphs in rapid succession. In a few months the authority 
of the Parliament was fully established over the whole king- 
dom. Charles fled to the Scots, and was by them, in a 
manner which did not much exalt their national character, 
delivered up to his English subjects. 

In war this strange force was irresistible. The stubborn 
courage characteristic of the English people was, by the sys- 
tem of Cromwell, at once regulated and stimulated. Other 
leaders have maintained orders as strict. Other leaders 
have inspired their followers with zeal as ardent. But in his 
camp alone the most rigid discipline was found in company 
with the fiercest enthusiam. His troops moved to victory 
with the precision of machines, while burning with the 
wildest fanaticism of crusaders. From the time when the 
army was remodeled to the time when it was disbanded, it 
never found, either in the British islands or on the Conti- 
nent, an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, 
Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 3I7 

surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against 
threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never 
failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was op- 
posed to them. They at length came to regard the day of 
battle as a day of certain triumph, and marched against the 
most renowned battalions of Europe with disdainful confi- 
dence. Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exulta- 
tion with which his English allies advanced to the combat, 
and expressed the delight of a true soldier, when he learned 
that it was ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to 
rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy ; and the ban- 
ished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride, when they 
saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes 
and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout 
the finest infantry of Spain. The military saints resolved 
that, in defiance of the old laws of the realm, and of the al- 
most universal sentiment of the realm, the king should ex- 
piate his crimes with blood. In order to accomplish their 
purpose, it was necessary that they should first break in 
pieces every part of the machinery of government. A revo- 
lutionary tribunal was created. That tribunal pronounced 
Charles a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy ; 
and his head was severed from his shoulders before thou- 
sands of spectators in front of the banqueting hall of his own 
palace. 

King, Lords, and Commons, had now in turn been van- 
quished And destroyed ; and Cromwell seemed to be left the 
sole heir of the powers of all three. Yet were certain limi- 
tations still imposed on him by the very army to which he 
owed his immense authority. That singular body of men 
was, for the most part, composed of zealous republicans. 
In the act of enslaving their country, they had deceived 
themselves into the belief that they were emancipating her. 
The book which they most venerated furnished them with 
a precedent, which was frequently in their mouths. It was 
true that the ignorant and ungrateful nation murmui'ed 



818 GREAT LEADERS. 

against its deliverers. Even so had another chosen nation 
murmured against the leader who brought it, by painful 
and dreary paths, from the house of bondage to the land 
flowing with milk and honey. Yet had that leader rescued 
his brethren in spite of themselves ; nor had he shrunk from 
making terrible examples of those who contemned the prof- 
fered freedom, and pined for the fleshpots, the taskmasters 
and the idolatries of Egypt. The object of the warlike 
saints who surrounded Cromwell was the settlement of a 
free and pious commonwealth. For that end they were 
ready to employ, without scruple, any means, however vio- 
lent and lawless. It was not impossible, therefore, to estab- 
lish by their aid a dictatorship such as no king had even 
exercised : but it was probable that their aid would be at 
once withdrawn from a ruler who, even under strict consti- 
tutional restraints, should venture to assume the kingly 
name and dignity. 

The sentiments of Cromwell were widely diflerent. He 
was not what he had been ; nor would it be just to consider 
the change which his views had undergone as the effect 
merely of selfish ambition. He had, when he came up to 
the Long Parliament, brought with him from his rural re- 
treat little knowledge of books, no experience of great affairs, 
and a temper galled by the long tyranny of the government 
and of the hierarchy. He had, during the thirteen years 
which followed, gone through a political education of no 
common kind. He had been a chief actor in a succession 
of revolutions. He had been long the soul, and at last the 
head, of a party. He had commanded armies, won battles, 
negotiated treaties, subdued, pacified, and regulated king- 
doms. It would have been strange indeed if his notions 
had been still the same as in the days when his mind was 
principally occupied by his fields and his religion, and when 
the greatest events which diversified the course of his life 
were a cattle fair or a prayer meeting at Huntingdon. He 
saw that some schemes of innovation for which he had once 



OLIVER CR03IWELL. 3I9 

been zealous, whether good or bad in themselves, were op- 
posed to the general feeling of the country, and that, if he 
persevered in those schemes, he had nothing before him but 
constant troubles, which must be suppressed by the constant 
use of the sword. He therefore wished to restore, in all es- 
sentials, that ancient constitution which the majority of the 
people had always loved, and for which they now pined. 

The course afterward taken by Monk was not open to 
Cromwell. The memory of one terrible day separated the 
great regicide for ever from the house of Stuart. What re- 
mained was that he should mount the ancient English 
throne, and reign according to the ancient English polity. 
If he could effect this, he might hope that the wounds of 
the lacerated state would heal fast. Great numbel's of hon- 
est and quiet men would speedily rally round him. Those 
Royalists whose attachment was rather to institutions than 
to persons, to the kingly office than to King Charles I 
or King Charles II, would soon kiss the hand of King 
Oliver. The peers, who now remained sullenly at their 
country houses, and refused to take any part in public 
affairs, would, when summoned to their House by the writ 
of a king in possession, gladly resume their ancient func- 
tions. Northumberland and Bedford, Manchester and 
Pembroke, would be proud to bear the crown and the spurs, 
the scepter and the globe, before the restorer of aristocracy. 
A sentiment of loyalty would gradually bind the people to 
the new dynasty ; and, on the decease of the founder of that 
dynasty, the royal dignity might descend with general ac- 
quiescence to his posterity. 

The ablest Royalists were of opinion that these views 
were correct, and that, if Cromwell had been permitted to 
follow his own judgment, the exiled line would never have 
been restored. But his plan was directly opposed to the 
feelings of the only class which he dared not offend. The 
name of king was hateful to the soldiers. Some of ttiem 
were indeed unwilling to see the administration in the 



320 GREAT LEADERS. 

hands of any single person. The great majority, however, 
were disposed to support their general, as elective first mag- 
istrate of a commonwealth, against all factions which might 
resist his authority : but they would not consent that he 
should assume the regal title, or that the dignity, which 
was the just reward of his personal merit, should be declared 
hereditary in his family. All that was left to him Avas to 
give to the new republic a constitution as like the constitu- 
tion of the old monarchy as the army would bear. 

Had he been a cruel, licentious, and rapacious prince, 
the nation might have found courage in despair, and might 
have made a convulsive effort to free itself from military 
domination. But the grievances which the country suffered, 
though such as excited serious discontent, were by no means 
such as impel great masses of men to stake their lives, their 
fortunes, and the welfare of their families against fearful 
odds The taxation, though heavier than it had been under 
the Stuarts, was not heavy when compared with that of the 
neighboring states and with the resources of England. Prop- 
erty was secure. Even the Cavalier, who refrained from 
giving disturbance to the new settlement, enjoyed in peace 
whatever the civil troubles had left him. The laws were 
violated only in cases where the safety of the Protector's 
person and government was concerned. Justice was admin- 
istered between man and man with an exactness and purity 
not before known. Under no English government, since 
the Reformation, had there been so little religious persecu- 
tion. The unfortunate Roman Catholics, indeed, were held 
to be scarcely within the pale of Christian charity. But the 
clergy of the fallen Anglican Church were suffered to cele- 
brate their worship on condition that they would abstain 
from preaching about politics. Even the Jews, whose pub- 
lic worship had, ever since the thirteenth century, been in- 
terdicted, were, in spite of the strong opposition of jealous 
traders and fanatical theologians, permitted to build a syna- 
gogue in London. 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 321 

The Protector's foreign policy at tlie same time extorted 
the ungracious approbation of those who most detested him. 
The Cavaliers could scarcely refrain from wishing that one 
who had done so much to raise the fame of the nation had 
been a legitimate king ; and the Kepublicans were forced to 
own that the tyrant suffered none but himself to wrong his 
country, and that, if he had robbed her of liberty, he had at 
least given her glory in exchange. After half a century dur- 
ing which England had been of scarcely more weight in 
European politics than Venice or Saxony, she at once be- 
came the most formidable power in the world, dictated terms 
of peace to the United Provinces, avenged the common in- 
juries of Christendom on the pirates of Barbary, vanquished 
the Spaniards by land and sea, seized one of the finest West 
Indian islands, and acquired on the Flemish coast a fortress 
which consoled the national pride for the loss of Calais. 
She was supreme on the ocean. She was the head of the 
Protestant interest. All the reformed churches scattered 
over Eoman Catholic kingdoms acknowledged Cromwell as 
their guardian. The Huguenots of Languedoc, the shep- 
herds who, in the hamlets of the Alps, professed a Protest- 
antism older than that of Augsburg, were secured from op- 
pression by the mere terror of his great name. The Pope 
himself was forced to preach humanity and moderation to 
popish princes. For a voice which seldom threatened in 
vain had declared that, unless favor were shown to the people 
of God, the English guns should be heard in the castle of 
Saint Angelo. In truth, there was nothing which Cromwell 
had, for his own sake and that of his family, so much reason 
to desire as a general religious war in Europe. In such a 
war he must have been the captain of the Protestant armies. 
The heart of England would have been with him. His vic- 
tories would have been hailed with a unanimous enthusiasm 
unknown in the country since the rout of the Armada, 
and would have effaced the stain which one act, condemned 
by the general voice of the nation, has left on his splendid 



322 GREAT LEADERS. 

fame. Unhappily for him he had no opportunity of dis- 
playing his admirable military talents, except against the 
inhabitants of the British isles. 

While he lived his power stood firm, an object of mingled 
aversion, admiration, and dread to his subjects. Few indeed 
loved his government ; but those who hated it most hated 
it less than they feared it. Had it been a worse government, 
it might perhaps have been overthrown in spite of all its 
strength. Had it been a weaker government, it would 
certainly have been overthrown in spite of all its merits. 
But it had moderation enough to abstain from those oj)- 
pressions which drive men mad ; and it had a force and 
energy which none but men driven mad by oppression 
would venture to encounter. 

It has often been affirmed, but with little reason, that 
Oliver died at a time fortunate for his renown, and that, if 
his life had been prolonged, it would probably have closed 
amid disgraces and disasters. It is certain that he was, 
to the last, honored by his soldiers, obeyed by the whole 
population of the British islands, and dreaded by all 
foreign powers; that he was laid among the ancient sov- 
ereigns of England with funeral pomp such as London 
had never before seen, and that he was succeeded by his 
son Richard as quietly as any king had ever been suc- 
ceeded by any Prince of Wales. 



LOED HALIFAX. 

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

[George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, one of the most brilliant of 
seventeenth century statesmen, born 1630, died 1695. He was a most 
important figure in the reigns of Charles H, James II, and of William 
III, and amid the dissensions and disturbances of the period his sanity, 
moderation, and wisdom did much to assuage the most dangerous 



LORD HALIFAX. 323 

party conflicts. Maccaulay's characterization of him is among the noted 
historic portraits.] 

Amokg the statesmen of those times Halifax was, in 
genius, the first. His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capa- 
cious. His polished, luminous, and animated eloquence, set 
off by the silver tones of his voice, was the delight of the 
House of Lords. His conversation overflowed with thought, 
fancy, and wit. His political tracts well deserve to be 
studied for their literary merit, and fully entitle him to a 
place among English classics. To the weight derived from 
talents so great and various he united all the influence which 
belongs to rank and ample possessions. Yet he was less suc- 
cessful in politics than many who enjoy smaller advantages. 
Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writ- 
ings valuable frequently impeded him in the contests of 
active life. For he always saw passing events, not in the 
point of view in which they commonly appear to one who 
bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, 
after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic 
historian. With such a turn of mind, he could not long 
continue to act cordially with any body of men. All the 
prejudices, all the exaggerations, of both the great parties 
in the state moved his scorn. He despised the mean arts 
and unreasonable clamors of demagogues. He despised still 
more the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience. 
He sneered impartially at the bigotry of the Churchman 
and at the bigotry of the Puritan. 

He was equally unable to comprehend how any man 
should object to saints' days and surplices, and how any man 
should persecute any other man for objecting to them. In 
temper he was what, in our time, is called a Conservative, 
in theory he was a Republican. Even when his dread of 
anarchy and his disdain for vulgar delusions led him to side 
for a time with the defenders of arbitrary power, his intellect 
was always with Locke and Milton. Indeed, his jests upon 



324 GREAT LEADERS. 

hereditary monarchy were sometimes such as would have 
better become a member of the Calf's Head Club than a 
privy councilor of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far 
from being a zealot that he was called by the uncharitable 
an atheist; but this imputation he vehemently repelled; 
and in truth, though he sometimes gave scandal by the way 
in which he exerted his rare powers both of reasoning and 
of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have been by no 
means unsusceptible of religious impressions. 

He was the "chief of those politicians whom the two great 
parties contemptuously called trimmers. Instead of quar- 
reling with this nickname, he assumed it as a title of honor, 
and vindicated, with great vivacity, the dignity of the ap- 
pellation. Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. 
The temperate zone trims between the climate in which men 
are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The 
English Church trims ^between the Anabaptist madness and 
the Papist lethargy. The English constitution trims be- 
tween Turkish despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is 
nothing but a just temper between propensities any one of 
which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice. Nay, the per- 
fection of the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact 
equilibrium of attributes, none of which could preponderate 
without disturbing the whole moral and physical order of 
the world. 

Thus Halifax was a trimmer on principle. He was also 
a trimmer by the constitution both of his head and of his 
heart. His understanding was keen, skeptical, inexhaustibly 
fertile in distinctions and objections ; his taste refined ; his 
sense of the ludicrous exquisite ; his temper placid and for- 
giving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to 
malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man 
could not long be constant to any band of political allies. 
He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd 
of renegades. For though, like them, he passed from side to 
side, his transition was always in the direction opposite to 



LORD HALIFAX, 325 

theirs. He liaci nothing in common with those who fly 
from extreme to extreme, and who regard the party which 
tliey have deserted with an animosity far exceeding that of 
consistent enemies. His place was on the debatable ground 
between the hostile divisions of the community, and he 
never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The 
party to which he at any moment belonged was the party 
which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the 
party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He 
was, therefore, always severe upon his violent associates, and 
was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. 
Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive 
triumph incurred his censure ; and every faction, when van- 
quished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his 
lasting honor it must be mentioned that he attempted to 
save those victims whose fate has left the deepest stain both 
on the Whig and on the Tory name. 

He had greatly distinguished himself in opposition, and 
had thus drawn on himself the royal displeasure, which was, 
indeed, so strong that he was not admitted into the Council 
of Thirty without much difficulty and long altercation. As 
soon, however, as he had obtained a footing at court, the 
charms of his manner and of his conversation made him a 
favorite. He was seriously alarmed by the violence of the 
public discontent. He thought that liberty was for the 
present safe, and that order and legitimate authority were 
in danger. He therefore, as was his fashion, joined himself 
to the weaker side. Perhaps his conversion was not wholly 
disinterested. For study and reflection, though they had 
emancipated him from many vulgar prejudices, had left him 
a slave to vulgar desires. Money he did not want; and 
there is no evidence that he ever obtained it by any means 
which, in that age, even severe censors considered as dis- 
honorable ; but rank and power had strong attractions for 
him. He pretended, indeed, that he considered titles and 
great offices as baits which could allure none but fools, that 



326 GREAT LEADERS. 

lie hated business, pomp, and pageantry, and that his dearest 
Avish was to escape from the bustle and glitter of Whitehall 
to the quiet woods which surrounded his ancient mansion in 
Nottinghamshire ; but his conduct was not a little at vari- 
ance with his professions. In truth he wished to command 
the respect at once of courtiers and of philosophers, to be 
admired for attaining high dignities, and to be at the same 
time admired for despising them. 

More than one historian has been charged with partiality 
to Halifax. The truth is that the memory of Halifax is 
entitled in an especial manner to the protection of history. 
For what distinguishes him from all other English states- 
men is this, that through a long public life, and through 
frequent and violent revolutions of public feeling, he almost 
invariably took that view of the great questions of his time 
which history has finally adopted. He was called inconstant, 
because the relative position in which he stood to the con- 
tending factions was perpetually varying. As well might 
the pole star be called inconstant because it is sometimes to 
the east and sometimes to the west of the pointers. To 
have defended the ancient and legal constitution of the realm 
against a seditious populace at one conjuncture, and against 
a tyrannical government at another ; to have been the fore- 
most champion of order in the turbulent Parliament of 1680, 
and the foremost champion of liberty in the servile Parlia- 
ment of 1685 ; to have been just and merciful to Eoman 
Catholics in the days of the Popish Plot, and to Exclusion- 
ists in the days of the Eye House Plot ; to have done all in 
his power to save both the head of Strafford and the head of 
Kussell ; this was a course which contemporaries, heated by 
passion, and deluded by names and badges, might not un- 
naturally call fickle, but which deserves a very different 
name from the late justice of posterity. 



LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE. 327 

LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE. 

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

[Grandson of Henry IV, the greatest of the French Bourbon kings, 
though he himself was also called Le Grand, or The Great. Born 1038, 
died 1715. His reign was distinguished for the brilliant men he gath- 
ered at his court and the unparalleled reverses which befell his power 
and prosperity in his closing years.] 

The reign of Louis XIV is the time to which ultra-roy- 
alists refer as the golden age of France. It was, in truth, 
one of those periods which shine with an unnatural and 
delusive splendor. Concerning Louis XIV himself, the 
world seems at last to have formed a correct judgment. He 
was not a great general; he was not a great statesman; 
but he was, in one sense of the word, a great king. Never 
was there so consummate a master of what our James I 
would have called kingcraft — of all those arts which most 
advantageously display the merits of a prince and most 
completely hide his defects. Though his internal adminis- 
tration was bad, though military triumphs which gave 
splendor to the early part of his reign were not achieved 
by himself, though his later years were crowded with de- 
feats and humiliations, though he was so ignorant that he 
scarcely understood the Latin of his mass-book, though he 
fell under the control of a cunning Jesuit and of a more 
cunning old Avoman, he succeeded in passing himself off on 
his people as a being above humanity. 

And this is the more extraordinary, because he did not 
seclude himself from the public gaze, like those Oriental 
despots whose faces are never seen, and whose very names 
it is a crime to pronounce lightly. It has been said that no 
man is a hero to his valet ; and all the world saw as much 
of Louis XIV as his valet could see. Five hundred people 
assembled to see him shave and put on his breeches in the 
morning. He then knelt down by the side of his bed and 



328 GREAT LEADERS. 

said liis prayer, the ecclesiastics on their knees and the lay- 
men with their hats before their faces. He walked about 
his garden with a train of two hundred courtiers at his heels. 
All Versailles came to see him dine and sup. He was put 
to bed at night in the midst of a crowd as great as that 
which had met to see him rise in the morning. He took 
his very emetics in state, and vomited majestically in the 
presence of all the grandes sucidpetites entrees. Yet, though 
he constantly exposed himself to the public gaze in situa- 
tions in which it is scarcely possible for any man to preser\'^ 
much personal dignity, he to the last impressed those who 
surrounded him with deepest awe and reverence. The 
illusion which he j^i'oduced on his worshipers can be com- 
pared only to those illusions to which lovers are proverbially 
subject during the season of courtship ; it was an illusion 
which affected even the senses. 

The contemporaries of Louis thought him tall. Yoltaire, 
who might have seen him, and who had lived with some of the 
most distinguished members of his court, speaks repeatedly 
of his majestic stature. Yet it is as certain as any fact can 
be that he was rather below than above the middle size. He 
had, it seems, a way of holding himself, a way of walking, a 
way of swelling his chest and rearing his head, which de- 
ceived the eyes of. the multitude. Eighty years after his 
death the royal cemetery was violated by the revolutionists ; 
his coffin was opened, his body was dragged out, and it ap- 
peared that the prince whose majestic figure had been so 
extolled was, in truth, a little man. His person and his 
government have had the same fate. He had the art of 
making both appear grand and august, in spite of the clear- 
est evidence that both were below the ordinary standard. 
Death and time have exposed both the deceptions. The 
body of the great king has been measured more justly than 
it was measured by the courtiers who were afraid to look 
above his shoe-tie. His public character has been scruti- 
nized by men free from the hopes and fears of Boileau and 



WILLIAM III OF ENGLAND. 329 

Moliere. In the grave the most majestic of princes is only 
five feet eight. In history the hero and the politician dwin- 
dles into a vain and feeble tyrant, the slave of priests and 
women ; little in war, little in government, little in every- 
thing but the art of simulating greatness. 

He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable 
people, a beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into 
deserts by misgovernment and persecution, factions dividing 
the court, a schism raging in the Church, an immense debt, 
an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an innumerable 
household, inestimable palaces and furniture. All the sap 
and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to 
feed one bloated and unwholesome excrescence. The nation 
was withered. The court was morbidly flourishing. Yet 
it does not appear that the associations which attached the 
people to the monarchy had lost strength during his reign. 
He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests, but 
he had struck their imaginations. 



WILLIAM III OF ENGLAND. 

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

[William Henry of Nassau, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of 
Holland, born 1650, raised to the English throne as king consort with 
Mary daughter of James H, in 1688, died 1702. One of the ablest 
monarchs in English annals, his accession to the throne of Great 
Britain was one of the turning points in modern history, and effect- 
ually consummated those reforms in the English Constitution inaugu- 
rated in the revolution of 1640.] 

The place which William Henry, Prince of Orange-Nas- 
sau, occupies in the history of England and of mankind is so 
great that it may be desirable to portray with some minute- 
ness the strong lineaments of his character.* 

He was nov/ in his thirty-seventh year. But both in 

* The time of life selected by Macaulay for this picture was just 
prior to William's accession to the English throne. — G. T. F. 



330 GREAT LEADERS. 

body and in mind he was older than other men of the same 
age. Indeed, it might be said that he had never been young. 
His external appearance is almost as well known to us as 
to his own captains and counselors. Sculptors, painters, and 
medallists exerted their utmost skill in the work of trans- 
mitting his features to posterity ; and his features were such 
that no artist could fail to seize, and such as, once seen, could 
never be forgotten. His name at once calls up before us a 
slender and feeble frame, a lofty and ample forehead, a nose 
curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivaling that of an 
eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and some- 
what sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a 
cheek pale, thin, and deeply furrowed by sickness and by 
care. That pensive, severe, and solemn aspect could scarcely 
have belonged to a happy or a good-humored man. But it 
indicates in a manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to 
the most arduous enterprises, and fortitude not to be shaken 
by reverses or dangers. 

Nature had largely endowed William with the qualities 
of a great ruler, and education had developed those qualities 
in no common degree. With strong natural sense, and rare 
force of will, he found himself, when first his mind began 
to open, a fatherless and motherless child, the chief of a 
great but depressed and disheartened party, and the heir to 
vast and indefinite pretensions, which excited the dread and 
aversion of the oligarchy then supreme in the United Prov- 
inces. The common people, fondly attached during three 
generations to his house, indicated, whenever they saw him, 
in a manner not to be mistaken, that they regarded him as 
their rightful head. The able and experienced ministers of 
the republic, mortal enemies of his name, came every day to 
pay their feigned civilities to him, and to observe the prog- 
ress of his mind. The first movements of his ambition were 
carefully watched ; every unguarded word uttered by him 
was noted down ; nor had he near him any adviser on whose 
judgment reliance could be placed. 



WILLI A31 III OF ENGLAND. 331 

He was scarcely fifteen years old when all the domestics 
who were attached to his interest, or who enjoyed any share 
of his confidence, were removed from under his roof by the 
jealous government. He remonstrated with energy beyond 
liis years, but in vain. Vigilant observers saw the tears more 
than once rise in the eyes of the young state prisoner. His 
health, naturally delicate, sank for a time under the emotions 
which his desolate situation had produced. Such situa- 
tions bewilder and unnerve the weak, but call forth all the 
strength of the strong. Surrounded by snares in which an 
ordinary youth would have perished, William learned to 
tread at once warily and firmly. Long before he reached 
manhood he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle curi- 
osity by dry and guarded answers ; how to conceal all pas- 
sions under the same show of grave tranquillity. Meanwhile 
he made little proficiency in fashionable or literary accom- 
plishments. The manners of the Dutch nobility of that age 
wanted the grace which was found in the highest perfection 
among the gentlemen of France, and which, in an inferior 
degree, embellished the court of England ; and his manners 
were altogether Dutch. Even his countrymen thought him 
blunt. To foreigners he often seemed churlish. In his in- 
tercourse with the world in general he appeared ignorant or 
negligent of those arts which double the value of a favor 
and take away the sting of a refusal. He was little inter- 
ested in letters or science. The discoveries of Newton and 
Liebnitz, the poems of Dryden and Boileau, were unknown 
to him. Dramatic performances tired him, and he was glad 
to turn away from the stage and to talk about public affairs, 
while Orestes was raving, or while Tartuffe was pressing El- 
mira's hand. 

He had, indeed, some talent for sarcasm, and not seldom 
employed, quite unconsciously, a natural rhetoric, quaint, 
indeed, but vigorous and original. He did not, however, in 
the least affect the character of a wit or of an orator. His 
attention had been confined to those studies which form 



332 GREAT LEADERS. 

strenuous and sagacious men of business. From a child he 
listened with interest when high questions of alliance, 
finance, and war were discussed. Of geometry he learned 
as much as was necessary for the construction of a ravelin 
or a horn-work. Of languages, by the help of a memory 
singularly j^owerful, he learned as much as was necessary to 
enable him to comprehend and answer without assistance 
everything that was said to him and every letter which he 
received. The Dutch was his own tongue. With the 
French he was not less familiar. He understood Latin, 
Italian, and Spanish. He spoke and wrote English and 
German, inelegantly, it is true, and inexactly, but fluently 
and intelligibly. No qualification could be more important 
to a man whose life was to be passed in organizing great 
alliances, and in commanding armies assembled from differ- 
ent countries. 

The faculties which are necessary for the conduct of 
important business ripened in him at a time of life when 
they have scarcely begun to blossom in ordinary men. Since 
Octavius the world had seen no such instance of precocious 
statesmanship. Skillful diplomatists were surprised to hear 
the weighty observations which at seventeen the prince 
made on public affairs, and still more surprised to see a lad, 
in situations in which he might have been expected to be- 
tray strong passion, preserve a composure as imperturbable 
as their own. At eighteen he sat among the fathers of the 
commonwealth — grave, discreet, and judicious as the oldest 
among them. At twenty-one, in a day of gloom and terror, 
he was placed at the head of the administration. At twenty- 
three he was renowned throughout Europe as a soldier and 
a politician. He had put domestic factions under his feet ; 
he was the soul of a mighty coalition ; and he had contended 
with honor in the field against some of the greatest generals 
of the age. 

His personal tastes were those rather of a warrior than 
of a statesman, but he, like his great-grandfather, the silent 



WILLIA3I III OF ENGLAND. 333 

prince who founded the Batavian commonwealth, occupies 
a far higher place among statesmen than among warriors. 
The event of battles, indeed, is not an unfailing test of the 
abilities of a commander ; and it would be peculiarly unjust 
to apply this test to William, for it was his fortune to be 
almost always opposed to captains who were consummate 
masters of their art, and to troops far superior in discipline 
to his own. Yet there is reason to believe that he was by 
no means equal, as a general in the field, to some who ranked 
far below him in intellectual powers. To those whom he 
trusted he spoke on this subject with the magnanimous 
frankness of a man who had done great things, and could 
well afford to acknowledge some deficiencies. He had never, 
he said, served an apprenticeship to the military profession. 
He had been placed, while still a boy, at the head of an 
army. Among his officers there had been none competent 
to instruct him. His own blunders and their consequences 
had been his only lessons. " I would give," he once ex- 
claimed, " a good part of my estates to have served a few 
campaigns under the Prince of Conde before I had to com- 
mand against him." 

It is not improbable that the circumstance which pre- 
vented William from attaining any eminent dexterity in 
strategy may have been favorable to the general vigor of his 
intellect. If his battles were not those of a great tactician, 
they entitled him to be called a great man. No disaster 
could for one moment deprive him of his firmness or of the 
entire possession of all his faculties. His defeats were re- 
paired with such marvelous celerity that, before his enemies 
had sung the Te Deum, he was again ready for the conflict ; 
nor did his adverse fortune ever deprive him of the respect 
and confidence of his soldiers. That respect and confidence 
he owed in no small measure to his personal courage. Cour- 
age, in the degree which is necessary to carry a soldier with- 
out disgrace through a campaign, is possessed, or might, 
under proper training, be acquired by the great majority of 



334 GREAT LEADERS. 

men. But courage like that of "William is rare indeed. He 
was proved by every test ; by war, by wounds, by painful 
and depressing maladies, by raging seas, by the imminent 
and constant risk of assassination — a risk which has shaken 
very strong nerves, a risk which severely tried even the 
adamantine fortitude of Cromwell. Yet none could ever 
discover what that thing was which the Prince of Orange 
feared. His advisers could with difficulty induce him to 
take any precaution against the pistols and daggers of con- 
spirators. Old sailors were amazed at the composure which 
he i^reserved amid roaring breakers on a perilous coast. In 
battle his bravery made him conspicuous even among tens 
of thousands of brave warriors, drew forth the generous 
applause of hostile armies, and was scarcely ever questioned 
even by the injustice of hostile factions. 

During his first campaigns he exposed himself like a man 
who sought for death, was always foremost in the charge and 
last in the retreat, fought sword in hand, in the thickest press, 
and with a musket ball in his arm and the blood streaming 
over his cuirass, still stood his gi'ound and waved his hat under 
the hottest fire. His friends adjured him to take more care 
of a life invaluable to his country ; and his most illustrious 
antagonist, the great Conde, remarked, after the bloody day 
of Seneff, that the Prince of Orange had in all things borne 
himself like an old general, except in exposing himself like 
a young soldier. William denied that he was guilty of 
temerity. It was, he said, from a sense of duty and on a 
cool calculation of what the public interest required, that he 
was always at the post of danger. The troops which he 
commanded had been little used to war, and shrank from a 
close encounter with the veteran soldiery of France. It was 
necessary that their leader should show them how battles 
were to be won. And in truth more than one day which 
had seemed hopelessly lost was retrieved by the hardihood 
with which he rallied his broken battalions and cut down 
the cowards who set the example of flight. Sometimes, 



WILLIA3I III OF ENGLAND. 335 

however, it seemed that he had a strange pleasure in vent- 
uring his person. It was remarked that his spirits were 
never so high and his manners never so gracious and easy as 
amid the tumult and carnage of a battle. Even in his pas- 
times he liked the excitement of danger. Cards, chess, and 
billiards gave him no pleasure. The chase was his favorite 
recreation, and he loved it most when it was most hazardous. 
His leaps were sometimes such that his boldest companions 
did not like to follow him. He seemed to have thought 
the most hardy field sports of England effeminate, and to 
have pined in the great park of Windsor for the game 
which he had been used to drive to bay in the forests of 
Guelders— wolves and wild boars, and huge stags with six- 
teen antlers. 

The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable be- 
cause his physical organization was unusually delicate. From 
a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of man- 
hood his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack 
of small-pox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His 
slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He 
could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pil- 
lows, and could scarcely draw his breath in any but the pur- 
est air. Cruel headaches frequently tortured him. Exertion 
soon fatigued him. The physicians constantly kept up the 
hopes of his enemies by fixing some date beyond which, if 
there were anything certain in medical science, it was im- 
possible that his broken constitution could hold out. Yet, 
through a life which was one long disease, the force of his 
mind never failed, on any great occasion, to bear up his suf- 
fering and languid body. 

He was born with violent passions and quick sensibilities ; 
but the strength of his emotions was not suspected by the 
world. From the multitude his joy and his grief, his affec- 
tion and his resentment, were hidden by a phlegmatic seren- 
ity which made him pass for the most coldblooded of man- 
kind. Those who brought him good news could seldom 



336 GREAT LEADERS. 

detect any sign of pleasure. Those who saw him after a 
defeat looked in vain for any trace of vexation. He praised 
and reprimanded, rewarded and iiunished, with the stern 
tranquillity of a Mohawk chief ; but those who knew him 
well and saw him near were aware that under all this ice a 
fierce fire was constantly burning. It was seldom that anger 
deprived him of jDOwer over himself ; but when he was really 
enraged the first outbreak of his passion was terrible. It 
was, indeed, scarcely safe to approach him. On these rare 
occasions, however, as soon as he regained his self-command 
he made such ample reparation to those whom he had 
wronged as tempted them to wish that he would go into a 
fury again. His affection was as impetuous as his v/rath. 
Where he loved, he loved with the whole energy of his 
strong mind. When death separated him from what he 
loved, the few who witnessed his agonies trembled for his 
reason and his life. To a very small circle of intimate 
friends, on whose fidelity and secrecy he could absolutely 
depend, he was a different man from the reserved and sto- 
ical William whom the multitude supposed to be destitute 
of human feelings. He was kind, cordial, open, even con- 
vivial and jocose, would sit at table many hours, and would 
bear his full share in festive conversation. 

To him England was always a land of exile, visited with 
reluctance, and quitted with delight. Even when he ren- 
dered to her those services of which to this day we feel the 
happy effects, her welfare was not his chief object. What- 
ever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland. There was 
the stately tomb where slept the great politician whose 
blood, whose name, whose temperament, and whose genius 
he had inherited. There the very sound of his title was a 
spell which had, through three generations, called forth the 
affectionate enthusiasm of boors and artisans. The Dutch 
language was the language of his nursery. Among the 
Dutch gentry he had chosen his early friends. The amuse- 
ments, the architecture, the landscape of his native country 



WILL1A3I in OF ENGLAND. 337 

had taken hold on his heart. To her he turned with con- 
stant fondness from a prouder and fairer rival. In the gal- 
lery of Whitehall he pined for the familiar House in the 
Wood at the Hague, and never v^^as so happy as when he 
could quit the magnificence of Windsor for his far humbler 
seat at Loo. 

During his splendid banishment it was his consolation 
to create around him, by building, planting, and digging, a 
scene which might remind him of the formal piles of red 
brick, of the long canals, and of the symmetrical flower-beds 
among which his early life had been passed. Yet even his 
affection for the land of his birth was subordinate to another 
feeling which early became supreme in his soul, which mixed 
itself with all his passions, which impelled him to marvelous 
enterprises, which supported him when sinking under mor- 
tification, pain, sickness, and sorrow, which, toward the 
close of his career, seemed during a short time to languish, 
but which soon broke forth again fiercer than ever, and con- 
tinued to animate him even while the prayer for the depart- 
ing was read at his bedside. That feeling was enmity to 
France, and to the magnificent king who, in more than 
one sense, represented France, and who to virtues and ac- 
complishments eminently French joined in large meas- 
ure that unquiet, unscrupulous, and vainglorious ambition 
which has repeatedly drawn on France the resentment of 
Europe. 

It is not difficult to trace the progress of the sentiment 
which gradually possessed itself of William's whole soul. 
When he was little more than a boy his country had been 
attacked by Lewis in ostentatious defiance of justice and 
public law, had been overrun, had been desolated, had been 
given up to every excess of rapacity, licentiousness, and cru- 
elty. The Dutch had in dismay humbled themselves before 
the conqueror, and had implored mercy. They had been 
told in reply that, if they desired peace, they must resign 
their independence, and do annual homage to the House of 
15 



338 GREAT LEADERS. 

Bourbon. The injured nation, driven to despair, had opened 
its dykes, and had called in the sea as an ally against the 
French tyranny. It was in the agony of that conflict, when 
peasants were flying in terror before the invaders, when hun- 
dreds of fair gardens and pleasure-houses were buried be- 
neath the waves, when the deliberations of the States were 
interrupted by the fainting and the loud weeping of ancient 
senators who could not bear the thought of surviving the 
freedom and glory of their native land, that William had 
been called to the head of affairs. 

The French monarchy was to him what the Koman re- 
public was to Hannibal, what the Ottoman power was to 
Scanderbeg, what the Southron domination was to Wallace. 
Eeligion gave her sanction to that intense and unquenchable^ 
animosity. Hundreds of Calvinistic preachers proclaimed 
that the same power which had set apart Samson from the 
womb to be the scourge of the Philistine, and which had 
called Gideon from the threshing-floor to smite the Midian- 
ite, had raised up William of Orange to be the champion of 
all free nations and of all pure Churches ; nor was this no- 
tion without influence on his own mind. To the confldence 
which the heroic fatalist placed in his high destiny and in 
his sacred cause is to be partly attributed his singular in- 
difference to danger. He had a great work to do ; and till 
it was done nothing could harm him. Therefore it was 
that, in spite of the prognostications of physicians, he recov- 
ered from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of 
assassins conspired in vain against his life, that the open 
skiff to which he trusted himself on a starless night, amid 
raging waves, and near a treacherous shore, brought him 
safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle, the cannon 
balls passed him by to right and left. The ardor and per- 
severance with which he devoted himself to his mission have 
scarcely any parallel in history. 




PETER THE GREAT. 



PETER THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA. 339 

PETEE THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA. 

By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

[Creator of the modern Russian empire, born 1673 ; died 1725. 
Shortly after assuming the throne of a nation of barbarians, and vigor- 
ously repressing internal disturbances, he began that series of reforms 
by which he hoped to civilize his people. He spent seventeen months 
traveling and studying the arts and sciences, which had made other 
nations great. On returning to Russia he enforced many revolution- 
ary changes with the strictness of a despot, and introduced institutions 
before unknown to Russia. He built St. Petersburg in the marshes at 
the mouth of the Neva, and displayed extraordinary energy in recast- 
ing the whole military and civil polity of the nation. He displayed 
marked ability as a soldier in his wars with his neighbors, but his 
genius shone most brightly in civil administration, though he never 
ceased to be a barbarian and the sternest of despots.] 

Our ancestors were not a little surprised to learn that a 
young barbarian, who had, at seventeen years of age, become 
the autocrat of the immense region stretching from the con- 
fines of Sweden to those of China, and whose education had 
been inferior to that of an English farmer or shopman, had 
planned gigantic improvements, had learned enough of 
some languages of Western Europe to enable him to com- 
municate with civilized men, had begun to surround himself 
with able adventurers from various parts of the world, had 
sent many of his young subjects to study languages, arts, 
and sciences in foreign cities, and finally had determined to 
travel as a private man, and to discover, by personal observa- 
tion, the secret of the immense prosperity and power enjoyed 
by some communities whose whole territory was far less 
than the hundredth part of his dominions. 

It might have been expected that France would have 
been the first object of his curiosity. For the grace and 
dignity of the French Court, the splendor of the French 
Court, the discipline of the French armies, and the genius 



340 GREAT LEADERS. 

and learning of the French writers, were then renowned all 
over the world. But the Czar's mind had early taken a 
strange ply which it retained to the last. His empire was 
of all empires the least capable of being made a great naval 
power. The Swedish provinces lay between his states and 
the Baltic. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles lay between 
his states and the Mediterranean. He had access to the 
ocean only in a latitude in which navigation is, during a 
great part of every year, perilous and difficult. On the 
ocean he had only a single port, Archangel ; and the whole 
shipping of Archangel was foreign. There did not exist a 
Eussian vessel larger than a fishing boat. Yet, from some 
cause which can not now be traced, he had a taste for mari- 
time pursuits which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a 
monomania. His imagination was full of sails, yardarms, 
and rudders. That large mind, equal to the highest duties 
of the general and the statesman, contracted itself to the 
most minute details of naval architecture and naval disci- 
pline. 

The chief ambition of the great conqueror and legis- 
lator was to be a good boatswain and a good ship's car- 
penter. Holland and England therefore had for him an 
attraction which was wanting to the galleries and terraces 
of Versailles. He repaired to Amsterdam, took a lodging 
in the dockyard, assumed the garb of a pilot, put down his 
name on the list of workmen, wielded with his own hand 
the caulking iron and the mallet, fixed the pumps, and 
twisted the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay their 
respects to him were forced, much against their will, to 
clamber up the rigging of a man-of-war, and found him en- 
throned on the cross-trees. 

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now 
crowded to behold. His stately form, his intellectual fore- 
head, his piercing black eye, his Tartar nose and mouth, his 
gracious smile, his frown black with all the stormy rage and 
hate of a barbarian tyrant, and above all a strange nervous 



PETER THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA, 34I 

convulsion which sometimes transformed his countenance, 
during a few moments, into an object on which it was impos- 
sible to look without terror, the immense quantities of meat 
which he devoured, the pints of brandy which he swallowed, 
and which, it was said, he had carefully distilled with his 
own hands, the fool who jabbered at his feet, the monkey 
which grinned at the back of his chair, were, during some 
weeks, popular topics of conversation. He meanwhile 
shunned the public gaze with a haughty shyness which 
inflamed curiosity. He went to a play ; but as soon as he 
perceived that pit, boxes, and gallery were staring, not at 
the stage, but at him, he retired to a back bench where he 
was screened from observation by his attendants. He was 
desirous to see a sitting of the House of Lords ; but, as he 
was determined not to be seen, he was forced to climb up 
to the leads, and to peep through a small window. He heard 
with great interest the royal assent given to a bill for raising 
fifteen hundred thousand pounds by land-tax, and learned 
with amazement that this sum, though larger by one half 
than the whole revenue which he could wring from the 
population of the immense empire of which he was absolute 
master, was but a small part of what the Commons of Eng- 
land voluntarily granted every year to their constitutional 
king. 

William judiciously humored the whims of his illustrious 
guest, and stole to Norfolk Street so quietly that nobody in 
the neighborhood recognized his Majesty in the thin gen- 
tleman who got out of the modest-looking coach at the 
czar's lodgings. The czar returned the visit with the same 
precautions, and was admitted into Kensington House by a 
back door. It was afterward known that he took no notice 
of the fine pictures with which the palace was adorned. But 
over the chimney of the royal sitting-room was a plate which, 
by an ingenious machinery, indicated the direction of the 
wind, and with this plate he was in raptures. 

He soon became weary of his residence. He found that 



342 GREAT LEADERS, 

he was too far from the objects of his curiosity, and too near 
to the crowds to which he was himself an object of curiosity. 
He accordingly removed to Deptford, and was there lodged 
in the house of John Evelyn, a house which had long been 
a favorite resort of men of letters, men of taste, and men of 
science. Here Peter gave himself up to his favorite pur- 
suits. He navigated a yacht every day up and down the 
river. His apartment was crowded with models of three- 
deckers and two-deckers, frigates, sloops, and fire-ships. 
The only Englishman of rank in whose society he seemed to 
take much pleasure was the eccentric Caermarthen, whose 
passion for the sea bore some resemblance to his own, and 
who was very competent to give an opinion about every joart 
of a ship from the stem to the stern. Caermarthen, indeed, 
became so great a favorite that he prevailed on the czar to 
consent to the admission of a limited quantity of tobacco 
into Kussia. There was reason to apprehend that the Rus- 
sian clergy would cry out against any relaxation of the an- 
cient rule, and would strenuously maintain that the practice 
of smoking was condemned by that text which declares that 
man is defiled, not by those things which enter in at the 
mouth, but by those things which proceed out of it. This 
apprehension was expressed by a deputation of merchants 
who were admitted to an audience of the czar ; but they 
were reassured by the air with which he told them that he 
knew how to keep priests in order. 

He was indeed so free from any bigoted attachment to 
the religion in which he had been brought up that both 
Papists and Protestants hoped at different times to make 
him a proselyte. Burnet, commissioned by his brethren, 
and impelled, no doubt, by his own restless curiosity and 
love of meddling, repaired to Deptford and was honored 
with several audiences. The czar could not be persuaded 
to exhibit himself at St. Paul's, but he was induced to visit 
Lambeth Palace. There he saw the ceremony of ordination 
performed, and expressed warm approbation of the Anglican 



PETER THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA. 343 

ritual. Nothing in England astonished him so much as the 
archiepiscopal library. It was the first good collection of 
books that he had seen ; and he declared that he had never 
imagined that there were so many printed volumes in the 
world. 

The impression which he made on Burnet was not favor- 
able. The good bishop could not understand that a mind 
which seemed to be chiefly occupied with questions about 
the best place for a capstan and the best way of rigging a 
jury-mast might be capable, not merely of ruling an empire, 
but of creating a nation. He claimed that he had gone to 
see a great prince, and had found only an industrious ship- 
wright. Nor does Evelyn seem to have formed a much 
more favorable opinion of his august tenant. It was, in- 
deed, not in the character of tenant that the czar was likely 
to gain the good word of civilized men. With all the high 
qualities which were j)eculiar to himself, he had all the filthy 
habits which were then common among his countrymen. 
To the end of his life, while disciplining armies, founding 
schools, framing codes, organizing tribunals, building cities 
in deserts, joining distant seas by artificial rivers, he lived 
in his palace like a hog in a sty ; and, when he was enter- 
tained by other sovereigns, never failed to leave on their 
tapestried walls and velvet state beds unequivocal proof that 
a savage had been there. Evelyn's house was left in such a 
state that the Treasury quieted his complaints with a con- 
siderable sum of money. 

Toward the close of March the czar visited Portsmouth, 
saw a sham sea-fight at Spithead, watched every movement 
of the contending fleets with intense interest, and expressed 
in warm terms his gratitude to the hospitable government 
which had provided so delightful a spectacle for his amuse- 
ment and instruction. After passing more than three 
months in England, he departed in high good-humor. 



344 GREAT LEADERS. 

DUKE OF MAKLBOKOUGH. 

By WILLIAM EDWARD HAETPOLE LECKY. 

[John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, born 1650, died 1723. All 
his early fortunes were due to the favor of James II, but he deserted 
his patron, and his intrigues carried over a large following of the 
English nobility to the cause of the Prince of Orange. For this he 
was rewarded with the dukedom of Marlborough. Politically Marl- 
borough was a traitor to nearly every cause he served, and was con- 
tinually plotting to undermine William as he had done in the case of 
James. To Anne, under whom he reaped his great military glory, 
though he had distinguished himself at an earlier period, he was proba- 
bly loyal. The victories which established his place among the lead- 
ing soldiers of modern times were Blenheim, in 1704 ; Ramillies, in 
1706; Oudenarde, in 1708; Malplaquet, in 1709; and the capture of 
Bouchain, in 1711. He achieved eminence as a statesman and admin- 
istrator as well as a soldier, but it is in the latter capacity that he 
ranks among the great men of the world.] 

Beyond comparison the greatest of English generals, 
Marlborough raised his country to a height of military 
glory such as it had never attained since the days of Poitiers 
and of Agincourt, and his victories appeared all the more 
dazzling after the ignominious reigns of the last two Stuarts, 
and after the many failures that checkered the enterprises 
of William. His military genius, though once bitterly 
decried by party malignity, will now be universally ac- 
knowledged, and it was sufficient to place him among the 
greatest captains who have ever lived. Hardly any other 
modern general combined to an equal degree the three great 
attributes of daring, caution, and sagacity, or conducted 
military enterprises of equal magnitude and duration with- 
out losing a single battle or failing in a single siege. He 
was one of the very few commanders who appear to have 
shown equal skill in directing a campaign, in winning a 
battle, and in improving a victory. It can not, indeed, be 



DUKE OF MAELBOROUGE. 345 

said of him, as it may be said of Frederick the Great, that 
he was at the head of a small power, with almost all Europe 
in arms against it, and that nearly every victory he won was 
snatched from an army enormously outnumbering his own. 
At Blenheim and Oudenarde the French exceeded by a few 
thousands the armies of the allies. At Ramillies the army 
of Marlborough was slightly superior. At Malplaquet the 
opposing forces were almost equal. Nor did the circum- 
stances of Marlborough admit of a military career of the 
same brilliancy, variety, and magnitude of enterprise as that 

of Napoleon. . 

But both Frederick and Napoleon experienced crushing 
disasters, and both of them had some advantages which 
Marlborough did not possess. Frederick was the absolute 
ruler of a state which had for many years been governed 
exclusively on the military principle, in which the first and 
almost the sole object of the government had been to tram 
and discipline the largest and most perfect army the nation 
could support. Napoleon was the absolute ruler of the fore- 
most military power on the Continent at a time when the 
enthusiasm of a great revolution had given it an unparalleled 
energy, when the destruction of the whole hierarchy of rank 
and the opening of all posts to talent had brought an ex- 
traordinary amount of ability to the forefront, and when 
the military administrations of surrounding nations were 
singularly decrepit and corrupt. Marlborough, on the other 
hand, commanded armies consisting in a great degree of 
confederates and mercenaries of many different nationalities, 
and under many different rulers. He was thwarted at 
every step by political obstacles, and by the much graver 
obstacles arising from divided command and personal or 
national jealousies; he- contended against the first military 
nation of the Continent, at a time when its military organi- 
zation had attained the highest perfection, and when a long 
succession of brilliant wars had given it a school of officers 
of consummate skill. 



346 GMJSAT LEADERS. 

But great as were his military gifts, they would have 
been insufficient had they not been allied with other qualities 
well fitted to win the admiration of men. Adam Smith 
has said, with scarcely an exaggeration, that " it is a charac- 
teristic almost peculiar to the great Duke of Marlborough, 
that ten years of such uninterrupted and such splendid 
successes as scarce any other general could boast of, never 
betrayed him into a single rash action, scarcely into a single 
rash word or expression. Nothing in his career is more 
admirable than the unwearied patience, the inimitable skill, 
the courtesy, the tact, the self-command with which he em- 
ployed himself during many years in reconciling the inces- 
sant differences, overcoming the incessant opposition, and 
soothing the incessant jealousies of those with whom he was 
compelled to co-operate. His private correspondence abun- 
dantly shows how gross was the provocation he endured, how 
keenly he felt it, how nobly he bore it. 

As a negotiator he ranks with the most skillful diploma- 
tists of his age, and it was no doubt his great tact in manag- 
ing men that induced his old rival Bolingbroke, in one of 
his latest writings, to describe him as not only the greatest 
general, but also " the greatest minister our country or any 
other has produced." Chesterfield, while absurdly de- 
preciating his intellect, admitted that "his manner was 
irresistible," and he added that, of all men he had ever 
known, Marlborough "possessed the graces in the highest 
degree." Nor was his character without its softer side. 
Though he can not, I think, be acquitted of a desire to pro- 
long war in the interests of his personal or political ambition, 
it is at least true that no general ever studied more, by 
admirable discipline and by uniform humanity, to mitigate 
its horrors. Very few friendships among great political or 
military leaders have been as constant or as unclouded by 
any shade of jealousy as the friendship between Marlborough 
and Godolphin, and between Marlborough and Eugene. 

His conjugal fidelity, in a time of great laxity and under 



DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. 347 

temptations and provocations of no common order, was be- 
yond reproach. His attachment to the Church of England 
was at one time the great obstacle to his advancement. It 
appears never to have wavered through all the vicissitudes 
of his life ;" and no one who reads his most private letters 
with candor can fail to perceive that a certain vein of genu- 
ine piety ran through his nature, however inconsistent it 
may appear with some portions of his career. 

Yet it may be questioned whether, even in the zenith of 
his fame, he was really popular. He had grave vices, and 
they were precisely of that kind which is most fatal to 
public men. His extreme rapacity in acquiring and his 
extreme avarice in hoarding money contrasted forcibly with 
the lavish generosity of Ormond, and alone gave weight to 
the charges of peculation that were brought against him. 
It is true that this, like all his passions, was under control. 
Torcy soon found that it was useless to attempt to bribe 
him, and he declined, as we have seen, with little hesitation, 
the enormously lucrative post of governor of the Austrian 
Netherlands when he found that the appointment aroused 
the strong and dangerous hostility of the Dutch. In these 
cases his keen and far-seeing judgment perceived clearly his 
true interest, and he had sufficient resolution to follow it. 
Yet still, like many men who have risen from great poverty 
to great wealth, avarice was the passion of his life, and the 
rapacity both of himself and of his wife was insatiable. 
Besides immense grants from Blenheim and marriage por- 
tions given by the queen to their daughters, they at one 
time received between them an annual income of public 
money of more than sixty-four thousand pounds. 

Nor can he be acquitted of very gross and aggravated 
treachery to those he served. It is, indeed, not easy to form 
a fair estimate in this respect of the conduct of public men 
at the period of the revolution. Historians rarely make 
sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments 
and dispositions even of the best men are colored by the 



348 GREAT LEADERS, 

moral tone of the age, society, or profession in wliich they 
live, or for the temptations of men of great genius and of 
natural ambition in times when no highly scrupulous man 
could possibly succeed in public life. Marlborough struggled 
into greatness from a very humble position, in one of the 
most profligate periods of English politics, and he lived 
through a long period when the ultimate succession of the 
crown was very doubtful. A very large proportion of the 
leading statesmen during this long season of suspense made 
such overtures to the deposed dynasty as would at least 
secure them from absolute ruin in the event of a change, 
and their conduct is surely susceptible of much palliation. 

The apparent interests and the apparent wishes of the 
nation hung so evenly and oscillated so frequently that 
strong convictions were rare, and even good men might 
often be in doubt. But the obligations of Churchill to 
James were of no common order, and his treachery was of 
no common dye. He had been raised by the special favor 
of his sovereign from the position of a page to the peerage, 
to great wealth, to high command in the army. He had 
been trusted by him with the most absolute trust. He not 
only abandoned him in the crisis of his fate, with circum- 
stances of the most deliberate and aggravated treachery, but 
also employed his influence over the daughter of his bene- 
factor to induce her to fly from her father and to array her- 
self with his enemies. Such conduct, if it had indeed been 
dictated, as he alleged, solely by a regard for the interests 
of Protestantism, would have been certainly, in the words 
of Hume, " a signal sacrifice to public virtue of every duty 
in private life " ; and it " required ever after the most up- 
right, disinterested, and public-spirited behavior, to render 
it justifiable." How little the later career of Marlborough 
fulfilled this condition is well known. 

When we find that, having been loaded under the new 
Government with titles, honors, and wealth, having been 
placed in the inner council and intrusted with the most impor- 



DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. 349 

tant state secrets, he was one of the first Englishmen to enter 
into negotiations with St. Germain's ; that he purchased liis 
pardon from James by betraying important military secrets 
to the enemies of his country, and that, during a great part 
of his subsequent career, while holding oifice under the 
Government, he was secretly negotiating with the Pretender, 
it is difficult not to place the worst construction upon his 
public life. It is probable, indeed, that his negotiations 
with the Jacobites were never sincere, that he had no real 
desire for a restoration, and that his guiding motive was 
much less ambition than a desire to secure what he pos- 
sessed ; but these considerations only slightly palliate his 
conduct. At the period of his downfall his later acts of 
treason were for the most part unknown, but his conduct 
toward James weighed heavily upon his reputation, and his 
intercourse with the Pretender, though not proved, was at 
least suspected by many. Neither Hanoverians nor Jaco- 
bites trusted him, neither Whigs nor Tories could regard 
him without reserve as their own. 

And with this feeling of distrust there was mingled a 
strong element of fear. In the latter years of Queen Anne 
the shadow of Cromwell fell darkly across the path of Marl- 
borough. To those who prefer the violent methods of a 
reforming despotism to the slow process of parliamentary 
amelioration, to those who despise the wisdom of following 
public opinion and respecting the prejudices and the asso- 
ciations of a nation, there can be no better lesson than is 
furnished by the history of Cromwell. Of his high and 
commanding abilities it is not here necessary to speak, nor 
yet of the traits of magnanimity that may, no doubt, be 
found in his character. Everything that great genius and 
the most passionate sympathy could do to magnify these has 
in this century been done, and a long period of unqualified 
depreciation has been followed by a reaction of extravagant 
eulogy. 

But the more the qualities of the man are exalted the 



350 GREAT LEADERS. 

more significant are the lessons of his life. Despising the 
national sentiment of loyalty, he and his party dethroned 
and beheaded the king. Despising the ecclesiastical senti- 
ment, they destroyed the Church. Despising the deep rev- 
erence for the constitution, they subverted the Parliament. 
Despising the oldest and most cherished customs of the 
people, they sought to mold the whole social life of England 
in the die of an austere Puritanism. They seemed for a 
time to have succeeded, but the result soon appeared. Ee- 
publican equality was followed by the period of most obse- 
quious, servile loyalty England has ever known. The age 
when every amusement was denounced as a crime was fol- 
lowed by the age when all virtue was treated as hypocrisy, 
and when the sense of shame seemed to have almost van- 
ished from the land. The prostration of the Church was 
followed, with the full approbation of the bulk of the na- 
tion, by the bitter, prolonged persecution of Dissenters. 
The hated memory of the Commonwealth was for more 
than a century appealed to by every statesman who desired 
to prevent reform or discredit liberty, and the name of 
Cromwell gathered around it an intensity of hatred ap- 
proached by no other in the history of England. This was 
the single sentiment common in all its vehemence to the 
Episcopalians of England, the Presbyterians of Scotland, 
and the Catholics of Ireland, and it had more than once 
considerable political effects. The ]3rofound horror of mili- 
tary despotism, which is one of the strongest and most salu- 
tary of English sentiments, has been, perhaps, the most valu- 
able legacy of the Commonwealth. In Marlborough, for the 
first time since the restoration, men saw a possible Cromwell, 
and they looked forward- with alarm to the death of the 
queen as a period peculiarly propitious to military usurpa- 
tion. Bolingbroke never represented more happily the feel- 
ings of the people than in the well-known scene at the first 
representation of the " Cato " of Addison. Written by a 
great Whig writer, the play was intended to advocate Whig 



SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. 351 

sentiments; but when the Whig audience had made the 
theatre ring with applause at every speech on the evil of 
despotism and arbitrary principles, the Tory leader availed 
himself of the pause between the acts to summon the chief 
actor, to present him with a purse of money, and to thank 
him publicly for having defended the cause of liberty so 
well, against a perpetual military dictator. 



Sm EGBERT WALPOLE. 

By WILLIAM EDWAKD HARTPOLE LECKY. 

[Afterward Earl of Orford, born 1676, died 1745 ; one of the most 
powerful forces in the history of English politics. Without brilliancy 
of talent, and utterly corrupt both as man and statesman, he was in 
many ways a patriot and a far-sighted supporter of the best interests 
of his country. He was first made prime minister in 1715, and in 1717 
brought forward a scheme for the reduction of the public debt, which 
may be regarded as the earliest germ of a national sinking fund. After 
the accession of George II he became the foremost political figure of 
his time, and kept his position against all attacks by great political 
dexterity and the favor of Queen Caroline. He held the premiership 
for twenty-one years, and was the first of the great English finance 
ministers.] 

It is worthy of notice that the long ascendency of Wal- 
pole was in no degree owing to any extraordinary brilliancy 
of eloquency. He was a clear and forcible reasoner, ready 
in reply, and peculiarily successful in financial exposition, 
but he had little or nothing of the temperament or the tal- 
ent of an orator. It is the custom of some writers to decry 
parliamentary institutions as being simply government by 
talking, and to assert that when they exist mere rhetorical 
skill will always be more valued than judgment, knowledge, 
or character. The enormous exaggeration of such charges 
may be easily established. It is, no doubt, inevitable that 
where business is transacted chiefly by debate, the talent of 
a debater should be highly prized ; but it is perfectly untrue 



352 GREAT LEADERS. 

that British legislatures have shown less skill than ordinary 
sovereigns in distinguishing solid talent from mere showy 
accomplishments, or that parliamentary weight has in Eng- 
land been usually proportioned to oratorical power. 

St. John was a far greater orator than Harley ; Pulteney 
was probably a greater orator than Walpole ; Stanley in mere 
rhetorical skill was undoubtedly the superior of Peel. Go- 
dolphin, Pelham, Castlereagh, Liverpool, Melbourne, Al- 
thorp, Wellington, Lord J. Eussell, and Lord Palmerston 
are all examples of men who, either as statesmen or as suc- 
cessful leaders of the House of Commons, have taken a fore- 
most place in English politics without any oratorical brill- 
iancy. Sheridan, Plunket, and Brougham, though orators of 
almost the highest class, left no deep impression on English 
public life ; the ascendancy of Grey and Canning was very 
transient, and no Opposition since the early Hanoverian 
period sank so low as that which was guided by Fox. The 
two Pitts and Mr. Gladstone are the three examples of 
speakers of transcendent power exercising for a consider- 
able time a commanding influence over English politics. 
The younger Pitt is, I believe, a real instance of a man 
whose solid ability bore no kind of proportion to his oratori- 
cal skill, and who, by an almost preternatural dexterity in 
debate, accompanied by great decision of character, and 
assisted by the favor of the king, by the magic of an illus- 
trious name, and by a great national panic, maintained an 
authority immensely greater than his deserts. But in this 
respect he stands alone. The pinnacle of glory to which 
the elder Pitt raised his country is a sufficient proof of the 
almost unequaled administrative genius which he displayed 
in the conduct of a war; and in the sphere of domestic 
policy it may be questioned whether any other English 
minister since the accession of the house of Brunswick 
has carried so many measures of magnitude and difficulty 
or exhibited so perfect a mastery over the financial system 
of the country as the great living statesman. 



SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. 353 



The qualities of Walpole were very different, but it is 
impossible, I think, to consider his career with adequate 
atenton without recognizing in him a great minister, 
a ho i°h the merits of his administration were often ra her 
tlative than positive, and although it exhibits few of those 
dramatic incidents, and is but little susceptible of that 
irorical coloring on which the reputation of statesmen 

^"tltSty remarkable originality of thought or cre- 
ative genius, he possessed in a high degree one 'ifl'yjl 
^reat !tatesman-the power of judging new and starUing 
Lnts in the moments of excitement or of panic as they 
would be judged by ordinary men when the excitement, 
The novelt , and the panic had passed. He was eminent y 
true to the character of his countrymen He discerned 
with a rare sagacity the lines of pohcy most suited to their 
lenius and .to their needs, and he had a sufficient ascend- 
ency in English politics to form its traditions to give a 
character and a bias to its institutions. The Whig party 
Lder his guidance, retained, though with diminished 
nergy, its old love of civil and of religious liberty, but it lost 
its foreign sympathies, its tendency to extravagance, it 
military restlessness. The landed gentry and ma great 
degree the Church, were reconciled to the new dynasty. 
The dangerous fissures which divided the English nation 
were filled up. Parliamentary government lost its old vio- 
lence, it entered into a period of normal and pacific action, 
and the habits of compromise, of moderation, and of prac- 
tical good sense, which are most essential to its success, 
were greatly strengthened. „ , , ■„• *„„uc 

These were the great merits of Walpole. His faults 
were very manifest, and are to be attributed in part to his 
own character, but in a great degree to the moral atmos- 
phere of his time. He was an honest man m the sense of 
desiring sincerely the welfare of his country and serving his 
sovereign with fidelity; but he was intensely wedded to 



354 GREAT LEADERS. 

power, exceedingly unscrupulous about the means of grasp- 
ing or retaining it, and entirely destitute of that delicacy 
of honor which marks a high-minded man. In the opinion 
of most of his contemporaries, Townshend and Walpole 
had good reason to complain of the intrigues by which 
Sunderland and Stanhope obtained the supreme power in 
1717; but this does not justify the factious manner in 
which Walpole opposed every measure the new ministry 
brought forward — even the Mutiny Act, which was plainly 
necessary to keep the army in discipline ; even the repeal 
of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, though he 
had himself denounced those acts as more like laws of 
Julian the Apostate than of a Christian legislature. 

He was sincerely tolerant in his disposition, and prob- 
ably did as much for the benefit of the Dissenters as could 
have been done without producing a violent and dangerous 
reaction of opinion ; but he took no measure to lighten 
the burden of the Irish penal code, and he had no scruple 
in availing himself of the strong feeling against the English 
Catholics and non- jurors to raise one hundred thousand 
pounds, by a special tax upon their estates, or in promising the 
Dissenters that he would obtain the repeal of the Test Act, 
when he had no serious intention of doing so. He warned 
the country faithfully against the South Sea scheme, but when 
his warning was disregarded he proceeded to speculate skill- 
fully and successfully in it himself. He labored long and 
earnestly to prevent the Spanish war, which he knew to be 
eminently impolitic ; but when the clamors of his oppo- 
nents had made it inevitable he determined that he would 
still remain at the helm, and he accordingly declared it 
himself. He governed the country mildly and wisely, but 
he was resolved at all hazards to secure for himself a com- 
plete monoply of power ; he steadily oj)posed the reconcili- 
ation of the Tories with the Hanoverian dynasty, lest it 
should impair his ascendancy, surrounded himself with col- 
leagues whose faculties rarely rose above the tamest medi- 



SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. 355 

ocrity, drove from power every man of real talent who 
might possibly become his rival, and especially repelled 
young men of promise, character, and ambition, whom a 
provident statesman, desirous of perpetuating his policy 
beyond his lifetime, would especially seek to attract. 

The scandal and also the evil effects of his political vices 
were greatly increased by that total want of decorum which 
Burke has justly noted as the weakest point of his character. 
In this respect his public and private life resembled one 
another. That he lived for many years in open adultery 
and indulged to excess in the pleasures of the table were 
facts which in the early part of the eighteenth century were 
in themselves not likely to excite much attention ; but his 
boisterous revelries at Houghton exceeded even the ordinary 
license of the country squires of his time, and the gross 
sensuality of his conversation was conspicuous in one of the 
coarsest periods of English history. When he did not talk 
of business, it was said, he talked of women ; politics and 
obscenity were his tastes. There seldom was a court less 
addicted to prudery than that of George II, but even its 
tolerance was somewhat strained by a minister who jested 
with the queen upon the infidelity of her husband ; who 
advised her on one occasion to bring to court a beautiful 
but silly woman as a " safe fool " for the king to fall in love 
with ; who, on the death of the queen, urged her daughters 
to summon without delay the two mistresses of the king in 
order to distract the mind of their father ; who at the same 
time avowed, with a brutal frankness, as the scheme of his 
future policy, that though he had been for the wife against 
the mistress, he would be henceforth for the mistress against 
the daughters. 

In society he had the weakness of wishing to be thought 
a man of gallantry and fashion, and his awkward addresses, 
rendered the more ludicrous by a singularly corpulent and 
ungraceful person, as well as the extreme coarseness into 
which he usually glided when speaking to and of womenj 



356 GREAT LEADERS. 

drew down upon him much ridicule and some contempt. 
His estimate of political integrity was very similar to his 
estimate of female virtue. He governed by means of an 
assembly which was saturated with corruption, and he fully 
acquiesced in its conditions and resisted every attempt to 
improve it. He appears to have cordially accepted the 
maxim that government must be carried on by corruption 
or by force, and he deliberately made the former the basis 
of his rule. He bribed George II by obtaining for him 
a civil list exceeding by more than one hundred thousand 
pounds a year that of his father. He bribed the queen by 
securing for her a jointure of one hundred thousand pounds 
a year, when his rival, Sir Spencer Compton, could only 
venture to promise sixty thousand pounds. He bribed the 
dissenting ministers to silence by the Eegium Donum for 
the benefit of their widows. He employed the vast patron- 
age of the crown uniformly and steadily with the single 
view of sustaining his political position, and there can be 
no doubt that a large proportion of the immense expendi- 
ture of secret-service money during his administration 
was devoted to the direct purchase of members of Parlia- 
ment. 

His influence upon young men appears to have been 
peculiarly pernicious. If we may believe Chesterfield, he 
was accustomed to ask them in a tone of irony upon their 
entrance into Parliament whether they too were going to be 
saints or Eomans, and he employed all the weight of his 
position to make them regard purity and patriotism as 
ridiculous or unmanly. Of the next generation of states- 
men. Fox, the first Lord Holland,* was the only man of re- 
markable ability who can be said to have been his disciple, 
and he was, perhaps, the most corrupt and unscrupulous 
of the statesmen of his age. 

* Father of Charles James Pox, whose picture is given by Lecky 
in another sketch.— G. T. P. 




FREDERICK THE GREAT. 



FREDERICK THE GREAT. 357 

FREDERICK THE GREAT. 

By THOMAS CARLYLE. 

[Otherwise Frederick II, third king of Prussia, son of Frederick 
William I, and grandson of George I of England, born 1712, died 1786. 
fiegarded in his youth, before his accession to the throne, as a spend- 
thrift and voluptuary or as a prince of weak and vacillating char- 
acter, his accession to the throne in 1740 instantly brought out his 
true character as the most able and masterful of rulers. His pro- 
tracted wars with odds against him, often of four to one, in which he 
fought the banded armies of Europe, stamped him as a soldier of 
splendid genius and iron tenacity of endurance and purpose. During 
the Seven Years' War he stood with only five million subjects against 
a hundred million. On the declaration of peace he devoted himself, 
with the same energy, to the restoration of the commerce, agriculture, 
and industries of Prussia as that with which he had fought her enemies, 
and with as much success. Frederick was not only a great soldier and 
civil administrator, though on somewhat despotic lines, but keenly 
sympathetic with literature, art, and science. All these he encouraged 
and fostered by every means. He was the true founder of the Prus- 
sian monarchy.] 

About fourscore years ago there used to be seen saun- 
tering on the terraces of Sans Souci, for a short time in 
the afternoon, or you might have met him elsewhere at an 
earlier hour, riding or driving in a rapid business manner 
on the open roads or through the scraggy woods and ave- 
nues of that intricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly 
interesting lean little old man, of alert though slightly 
stooping figure, whose name among strangers was King 
Friedrich the Second^ or Frederick the Great of Prussia, 
and at home among the common people, who much loved 
and esteemed him, was Vater Fritz — Father Fred — a name 
of familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. 
He is a king, every inch of him, though without the trap- 
pings of a king. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity 
of vesture ; no crown but an old military cocked hat — gen- 



358 GREAT LEADERS. 

erally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute softness 
if new — no scepter but one like Agamemnon's, a walking- 
stick cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick 
(with which he hits the horse " between the ears," say au- 
thors) — and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with 
red facings, coat likely to be old, and sure to have a good 
deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it ; rest of the apparel 
dim, unobtrusive in color or cut, ending in high overknee 
military boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept 
soft with an underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permit- 
ted to be blackened or varnished; Day and Martin with 
their soot-pots forbidden to approach. 

The man is not of godlike physiognomy, any more than 
of imposing stature or costume ; close-shut mouth with thin 
lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means 
of Olympian height ; head, however, is of long form, and 
has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beauti- 
ful man ; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. 
On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, 
as they are termed, of much hard labor done in this world, 
and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. 
Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what joys there were, but 
not expecting any worth mention ; great unconscious and 
some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery 
of humor — are written on that old face, which carries its 
chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the 
neck ; snuffy nose, rather flung into the air, under its old 
cocked hat — like an old snuffy lion on the watch ; and such 
a pair of eyes as no man or lion or lynx of that century bore 
elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have. 

" Those eyes," says Mirabeau, " which, at the bidding of 
his great soul, fascinated you with seduction or with terror 
{portaient^ au gre de son dme hero'iqne, la seduction ou la 
terreur).^^ Most excellent potent brilliant eyes, swift-dart- 
ing as the stars, steadfast as the sun ; gray, we said, of the 
azure-gray color ; large enough, not of glaring size ; the 



FREDERICK THE GREAT. 359 

habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, 
rapidity resting on depth, which is an excellent combina- 
tion, and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance 
springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the 
man. 

The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy — 
clear, melodious, and sonorous ; all tones are in it, from that 
of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing ban- 
ter (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of 
command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation ; 
a voice " the clearest and most agreeable in conversation I 
ever heard," says witty Dr. Moore. "He speaks a great 
deal," continues the doctor, " yet those who hear him re- 
gret that he does not speak a good deal more. His observa- 
tions are always lively, very often just, and few men possess 
the talent of repartee in greater perfection." 

This was a man of infinite mark to his contempora- 
ries, who had witnessed surprising feats from him in the 
world ; very questionable notions and ways, which he had 
contrived to maintain against the world and its criticisms, 
as an original man has always to do, much more an original 
ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to put 
him down, as it does, unconsciously or consciously, with all 
such, and after the most conscious exertions, and at one 
time a dead-lift spasm of all its energies for seven years, had 
not been able. Principalities and powers, imperial, royal, 
czarish, papal, enemies innumerable as the sea-sand, had 
risen against him, only one helper left among the world's 
potentates (and that one only while there should be help 
rendered in return), and he led them all such a dance as 
had astonished mankind and them. 

No wonder they thought him worthy of notice ! Every 
original man of any magnitude is — nay, in the long run, 
who or what else is ? But how much more if your original 
man was a king over men ; whose movements were polar, 
and carried from day to day those of the world along with 



360 GREAT LEADERS. 

them. The Samson Agonistes — were his life passed like 
that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of 
it only some bits of written paper — the Agonistes, and how 
he will comport himself in the Philistine mill ; this is always 
a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature, the rather if 
your Samson, royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued 
to the wheel, much more if he vanquish his enemies, not by 
suicidal methods, but march out at last flourishing his 
miraculous fighting implement, and leaving their mill and 
them in quite ruinous circumstances, as this King Fried- 
rich fairly managed to do. 

For he left the world all bankrupt, we may say ; fallen 
into bottomless abysses of destruction ; he still in a paying 
condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and 
him. AVhen he died, in 1786, the enormous phenomenon 
since called Frekch Revolution" was already growling 
audibly in the depths of the world, meteoric-electric corus- 
cations heralding it all round the horizon. Strange enough 
to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was Gabriel Honore 
Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another ; 
twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old gods 
and the first of the modern Titans — before Pelion leaped 
on Ossa , and the foul earth taking fire at last, its vile me- 
phitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This also is 
one of the peculiarities of Friedrich, that he is hitherto the 
last of the kings ; that he ushers in the French Revolution, 
and closes an epoch of world-history. Finishing off forever 
the trade of king, think many, who have grown profoundly 
dark as to kingship and him. 

The French Revolution may be said to have, for about 
half a century, quite submerged Friedrich, abolished him 
from the memories of men ; and now, on coming to light 
again, he is found defaced under strange mud incrustations, 
and the eyes of mankind look at him from a singularly 
changed, what we must call oblique and perverse point of 
vision. This is one of the difficulties in dealing with his 



FREDERICK THE GREAT. 3G1 

history — especially if you happen to believe both in the 
French Revolution and in him — that is to say, both that 
real kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the 
destruction of sham kingship (a frightful process) is occa- 
sionally so. 

On the breaking out of the formidable explosion and 
suicide of his century, Friedrich sank into comparative ob- 
scurity, eclipsed amid the ruins of that universal earthquake, 
the very dust of which darkened all the air, and made of 
day a disastrous midnight — black midnight, broken only 
by the blaze of conflagrations — wherein, to our terrified 
imaginations, were seen, not men, French and other, but 
ghastly portents, stalking wrathful, and shapes of aveng- 
ing gods. 

It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic ; 
especially to the generation that looked on him, and that 
waited shuddering to be devoured by him. In general, in 
that French Eevolution, all was on a huge scale; if not 
greater than anything in human experience, at least more 
grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to 
the shilling gallery; and there were fellows on the stage 
with such a breadth of saber, extent of whiskerage, strength 
of windpipe, and command of men and gunpowder as had 
never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked, and 
flourished about, counterfeiting Jove's thunder to an amaz- 
ing degree ! Terrific Drawcansir figures of enormous whis- 
kerage, unlimited command of gunpowder; not without 
sufficient ferocity, and even a certain heroism, stage hero- 
ism, in them ; compared with whom, to the shilling gallery, 
and frightened, excited theatre at large, it seemed as if there 
had been no generals or sovereigns before ; as if Friedrich, 
Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror, and Alexander the 
Great were not worth speaking of henceforth. 

All this, however, in half a century is considerably al- 
tered. The Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn 
off, the natural size is seen better ; translated from the bul- 
16 



362 GREAT LEADERS, 

letin style into that of fact and history, miracles, even to 
the shilling gallery, are not so miraculous. It begins to be 
apparent that there lived great men before the era of bulle- 
tins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagi'am shot away 
more gunpowder — gunpowder, probably, in the proportion 
of ten to one, or a hundred to one ; but neither of them was 
tenth part such a beating to your enemy as that of Ross- 
bach, brought about by strategic art, human ingenuity and 
intrepidity, and the loss of one hundred and sixty-five men. 
Leuthen, too, the battle of Leuthen (though so few English 
readers ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head be- 
side any victory gained by Napoleon or another. For the 
odds were not far from three to one ; the soldiers were of 
not far from equal quality ; and only the general was con- 
summately superior, and the defeat a destruction. 

Napoleon did, indeed, by immense expenditure of men 
and gunpowder, overrun Europe for a time ; but Napoleon 
never, by husbanding and wisely expending his men and 
gunpowder, defended a little Prussia against all Europe, 
year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough, 
and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So 
soon as the Drawcansir equipments are well torn off and 
the shilling gallery got to silence, it will be found that there 
were great kings before Napoleon, and likewise an art of 
war, grounded on veracity and human courage and insight, 
not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpin- 
ism, revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of 
men and gunpowder. " You may paint with a very big 
brush, and yet not be a great painter," says a satirical friend 
of mine. This is becoming more and more apparent, as the 
dust-whirlwind and huge uproar of the last generation 
gradually dies away again. 

Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods ; 
and there are various things to be said against him with 
good ground. To the last, a questionable hero ; with much 
in him which one could have wished not there, and much 



FREDERICK THE GREAT. 363 

wanting which one could have wished. But there is one 
feature which strikes you at an early period of the inquiry. 
That in his way he is a reality ; that he always means what 
he speaks ; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes 
for the truth ; and, in short, has nothing whatever of the 
hypocrite or phantasm. Which some readers will admit to 
be an extremely rare phenomenon. 

We perceive that this man was far indeed from trying to 
deal swindler-like with the facts around him ; that he hon- 
estly recognized said facts wherever they disclosed them- 
selves, and was very anxious also to ascertain their existence 
where still hidden or dubious. For he knew well, to a quite 
uncommon degree, and with a merit all the higher as it was 
an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable is the nature of 
facts, whether recognized or not, ascertained or not; how 
vain all cunning of diplomacy, management and sophistry, 
to save any mortal who does 7iot stand on the truth of 
things, from sinking in the long run. Sinking to the very 
mudgods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achieve- 
ments; and becoming an unnamable object, hidden deep 
in the cesspools of the universe. This I hope to make mani- 
fest ; this which I long ago discerned for myself, with pleas- 
ure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life. Which, 
indeed, was the first real sanction, and has all along been my 
inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. 
How this man, officially a king withal, comported himself in 
the eighteenth century, and managed not to be a liar and 
charlatan as his century was, deserves to be seen a little by 
men and kings, and may silently have didactic meanings 
in it. 

He that was honest with his existence has always mean- 
ing for us, be he king or peasant. He that merely shammed 
and grimaced with it however much, and with whatever 
noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked and eaten 
in this world, can not long have any. Some men do cook 
enormously (let us call it cooking^ what a man does in obedi- 



364 GREAT LEADERS. 

ence to his hunger merely, to his desires and passions merely) 
— roasting whole continents and populations, in the flames 
of war or other discord ; witness the Napoleon above spoken 
of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited ; 
in truth, infinite ; and the smallest of us could eat the entire 
solar system, had we the chance given, and then cry, like 
Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more solar systems 
to cook and eat. It is not the extent of the man's cookery 
that can much attach me to him ; but only the man him- 
self, and what of strength he had to wrestle with the mud- 
elements, and what of victory he got for his own benefit 
and mine. 



WILLIAM PITT, EAEL OF CHATHAM. 

By JOHN RICHARD GEEEN. 

[Born in 1708, died 1778, one of the most eminent of English states- 
men and orators. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he spent a short 
term in the array, but found his true vocation on being elected to 
Parliament in 1737. It was not till 1755 that he became virtual 
prime minister. Under his control the arms and diplomacy of 
England became generally victorious throughout the world. It was 
largely owing to his support that Frederick the Great was finally vic- 
torious over his enemies, and that a great and consistent foreign policy 
was inaugurated that raised the nation to a lofty pitch of glory. The 
elder Pitt was known as the " great commoner," and it was thought 
derogatory to his fame when he accepted a peerage. He was the firm 
and eloquent advocate of the American colonists in their claims against 
the mother-country.] 

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us 
most as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his 
speech and action stands out in utter contrast with the tone 
of his time. In the midst of a society critical, polite, indif- 
ferent, simple even to the affectation of simplicity, witty and 
amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and of head, 
skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of 



WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM. 365 

itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his convic- 
tion, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and 
true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatri- 
cal airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pomp- 
ousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to his 
contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed 
to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which 
he turned from a corruption which had till then been the 
great engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt 
in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to 
carry them out. " I know that I can save the country," he 
said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry into the minis- 
try, " and I know no other man can." The groundwork of 
Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride ; but it 
was a pride which kept him from stooping to the level of 
the men who had so long held England in their hands. He 
was the first statesman since the restoration who set the 
example of a purely public spirit. 

Keen as was his love of j)ower, no man ever refused 
office so often or accepted it with so strict a regard to the 
principles he professed. " I will not go to court," he replied 
to an offer which was made him, " if I may not bring the 
constitution with me." For the corruption about him he 
had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying 
of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset of his 
career Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office in 
his administration, that of paymaster of the forces ; but its 
profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt re- 
fused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride 
never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his atti- 
tude toward the people at large. No leader had ever a 
wider popularity than " the great commoner," as Pitt was 
styled, but his air was always that of a man who commands 
popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to 
flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring them- 
selves hoarse for " Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes 



GREAT LEADERS. 

as a worthless profligate ; and when all England went mad 
in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his esteem 
for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist on 
the side of loyalty. 

His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which flashed from 
the small, thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur 
of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Com- 
mons far greater than any other minister has possessed. He 
could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the 
whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to 
the arts by which men form a political party, and at the 
height of his power his personal following hardly numbered 
half a dozen members. 

His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament, but in. 
the people at large. His significant title of " the great com- 
moner " marks a political revolution. " It is the people who 
have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when 
the nobles of the cabinet opposed his will. He was the first 
to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind 
had ceased, and that the progress of commerce and industry 
had produced a great middle class which no longer found 
its representatives in the legislature. " You have taught 
me," said George II, when Pitt sought to save Byng by ap- 
pealing to the sentiment of Parliament, " to look for the 
voice of my people in other places than within the House of 
Commons." 

It was this unrepresented class which had forced him 
into power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater 
towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and 
addresses of confidence. " For weeks," laughs Horace Wal- 
pole, " it rained gold boxes." London stood by him through 
good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English 
merchants. Alderman Beckf ord, was proud to figure as his 
political lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized 
admirably with the temper of the commercial England 
which rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence, 



WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHA3L 367 

its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. 
The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural at- 
traction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were 
unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and 
full of tender affection for wife and child. But there was a 
far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence and for 
the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever since. 

He loved England with an intense and personal love. 
He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till 
England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were 
his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted 
him high above all thought of self or party spirit. " Be one 
people," he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his 
fall ; " forget everything but the public ! I set you the ex- 
ample ! " His glowing patriotism was the real spell by 
which he held England. But even the faults which check- 
ered his character told for him with the middle classes. 
The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been men whose 
pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence of 
pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the 
cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted busi- 
ness with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, 
genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural 
in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his 
affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance 
which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in 
flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole 
sneered at him for bringing into the House of Commons 
"the gestures and emotions of the stage." But the classes 
to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by 
faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman 
who was borne into the lobby amid the tortures of the 
gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last 
in a protest against national dishonor. 

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless elo- 
quence. The power of political speech had been revealed 



368 GREAT LEADERS. 

in tlie stormy debates of the long Parliament, but it was 
cramped in its utterance by the legal and theological 
pedantry of the time. Pendantry was flung off by the age 
of the revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his 
rivals v/e see ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness 
of expression, precision of thought, the lucidity of the 
pleader or the man of business, rather than the passion of 
the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had little or 
none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker of 
set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always 
his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, 
his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once 
to the front. That with defects like these he stood far 
above every orator of his time was due above all to his pro- 
found conviction, to the earnestness and sincerity with 
which he spoke. " I must sit still," he whispered once to a 
friend, " for when once I am up everything that is in my 
mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was 
transfigured by a large and poetic imagination, and by a 
glow of passion which not only raised him high above the 
men of his own day, but set him in the front rank among 
the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the 
common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, 
a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a 
lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of human 
feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn 
appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to 
the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the 
grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always 
as one having authority. He was in fact the first English 
orator whose words were a power, a power not over Parlia- 
ment only, but over the nation at large. Parliamentary re- 
porting was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached 
phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of 
Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was 
especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these 



EDMUND BURKE. 369 

brief passionate appeals, that the power of his eloquence lay. 
The few broken words we have of him stir the same thrill 
in men of our day which they stirred in the men of his own. 
But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence 
of a statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved 
almost all his greater struggles, his defense of the liberty of 
the subject against arbitrary imprisonment under "general 
warrants," of the liberty of the press against Lord Mansfield, 
of the rights of constituencies against the House of Com- 
mons, of the constitutional rights of America against Eng- 
land itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preserva- 
tion of Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by 
the creation of Germany. We have adopted his plans for 
the direct government of India by the crown, which when 
he proposed them were regarded as insane. Pitt was the 
first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of 
England. He was the first to sound the note of parlia- 
mentary reform. One of his earliest measures shows the 
generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scot- 
land by employing its Jacobites in the service of their 
country, and by raising the Highland regiments among its 
clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals 
showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowl- 
edge of men. 



EDMUND BURKE. 

By WILLIAM EDWAED HARTPOLE LECKY. 

[One of the greatest of English statesmen and orators, bom in Ire- 
land in 1730, died 1797. He entered Parliament in 1766, and at the 
beginning of the American troubles at once identified himself with the 
policy of conciliation and moderation. During his long parliamentary- 
career Burke distinguished himself in connection with every political 
problem which agitated the British Empire, though he never became 
prime minister, and was for the most of his life a member of the oppo- 
sition. Burke's speech at the trial of Warren Hastings is regarded by 



370 GREAT LEADERS, 

many critics as the greatest oration ever delivered in any forum. lie 
was scarcely less distinguished as a writer on political and philosophi- 
cal questions than as statesman and orator.J 

There are few men whose depth and versatility have 
been both so fully recognized by their contemporaries and 
whose pre-eminence in many widely different spheres is so 
amply attested. Adam Smith declared that he had found 
no other man who, without communication, had thought 
out the same conclusions on political economy as himself. 
Winstanley, the Camden Professor of Ancient History, bore 
witness to his great knowledge of the " philosophy, history, 
and filiation of languages, and of the principles of etymo- 
logical deduction." Arthur Young, the first living author- 
ity on agriculture, acknowledged his obligations to him for 
much information about his special pursuits, and it was in 
a great degree his passion for agriculture which induced 
Burke, when the death of his elder brother had improved 
his circumstances, to incumber himself with a heavy debt 
by purchasing that Beaconsfield estate where some of his 
happiest days were spent. His conversational powers were 
only equaled, and probably not surpassed, by those of John- 
son. Goldsmith described him as " winding into his sub- 
ject, like a serpent." " Like the fabled object of the fairy's 
favors," said Wilberf orce, " whenever he opened his mouth 
pearls and diamonds dropped from him." Grattan pro- 
nounced him the best talker he had ever known. Johnson, 
in spite of their violent political differences, always spoke of 
him with generous admiration. " Burke is an extraordinary 
man. His stream of mind is perpetual. . . . His talk is the 
ebullition of his mind. He does not talk for a desire of dis- 
tinction, but because his mind is full. . . . He is the only 
man whose common conversation corresponds with the gen- 
eral fame which he has in the world. Take up what topic 
you please, he is ready to meet you. ... No man of sense 
could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid 



ED31UND BURKE. 371 

a shower without being convinced that he was the first man 
in England." It is not surprising that " he is the first man 
in the' House of Commons, for he is the first man every- 
where." He once declared that " he knew but two men who 
had risen considerably above the common standard— Lord 
Chatham and Edmund Burke." 

The admirable proportion which subsisted between his 
different powers, both moral and intellectual, is especially 
remarkable. Genius is often, like the pearl, the offspring 
or the accompaniment of disease, and an extraordmary de- 
velopment of one class of faculties is too frequently balanced 
by an extraordinary deficiency of others. But nothing of 
this kind can be found in Burke. 

His intellectual energy was fully commensurate with his 
knowledge, and he had rare powers of bringing illustrations 
and methods of reasoning derived from many spheres to 
bear on any subject he touched, and of combining an ex- 
traordinary natural facility with the most untiring and fas- 
tidious labor. In debate images, illustrations, and argu- 
ments rose to his lips with a spontaneous redundance that 
astonished his hearers; but no writer elaborated his compo- 
sitions more carefully, and his printers were often aghast at 
the multitude of his corrections and alterations. Xor did 
his intellectual powers in any degree dry up or dwarf his 
moral nature. There is no public man whose character is 
more clearly reflected in his life and in his intimate cor- 
respondence; and it may be confidently said that there is 
no other public man whose character was in all essential 
respects more transparently pure. Weak health, deep and 
fervent religious principles, and studious habits, saved him 
from the temptations of youth ; and amid all the vicissitudes 
and corruption of politics his heart never lost its warmth, or 
his conscience its sensitiveness. 

There were faults, indeed, which were only too apparent 
in his character as in his intellect— an excessive violence 
and irritability of temper; personal antipathies, which were 



372 GREAT LEADERS, 

sometimes carried beyond all the bounds of reason ; party 
spirit, which was too often suffered to obscure his judgment 
and to hurry him into great intemperance and exaggeration 
of language. But he was emphatically a good man ; and in 
the higher moral qualities of public as of private life he has 
not often been surpassed. That loyal affection with which 
he clung through his whole life to the friends of his early 
youth ; that genuine kindness which made him, when still 
a poor man, the munificent patron of Barry and Crabbe, and 
which showed itself in innumerable acts of unobtrusive be- 
nevolence ; that stainless purity and retiring modesty of na- 
ture which made his domestic life so different from that of 
some of the greatest of his contemporaries ; that depth of 
feeling which made the loss of his only son the death-knell 
of the whole happiness of his life, may be traced in every 
stage of his public career. " I know the map of England," 
he once said, " as well as the noble lord, or as any other per- 
son, and I know that the way I take is not the road to 
preferment." Fidelity to his engagements, a disinterested 
pursuit of what he believed to be right, in spite of all the 
allurements of interest and of popularity ; a deep and ardent 
hatred of oppression and cruelty in every form ; a readiness 
at all times to sacrifice personal pretensions to party inter- 
ests ; a capacity of devoting long years of thankless labor to 
the service of those whom he had never seen, and who could 
never reward him, were the great characteristics of his life, 
and they may well make us pardon many faults of temper, 
judgment, and taste. 

In Parliament he had great obstacles to contend with. 
An Irishman unconnected with any of the great governing 
families, and without any of the influence derived from 
property and rank, he entered Parliament late in life and 
with habits fully formed, and during the greater part of his 
career he spoke as a member of a small minority in oppo- 
sition to the strong feeling of the House. He was too old 
and too rigid to catch its tone, and he never acquired that, 



EDMUND BURKE. 373 

subtle instinct or tact which enables some speakers to follow 
its fleeting moods and to strike with unfailing accuracy the 
precise key which is most in harmony with its prevailing 
temper. " Of all politicians of talent I ever knew," wrote 
Horace Walpole, " Burke has least political art," and his 
defects so increased with age that the time came when he 
was often listened to with undisguised impatience. He spoke 
too often, too vehemently, and much too long ; and his elo- 
quence, though in the highest degree intellectual, powerful, 
various, and original, was not well adapted to a popular 
audience. 

He had little or nothing of that fire and majesty of dec- 
lamation with which Chatham thrilled his hearers, and 
often almost overawed opposition, and as a parliamentary 
debater he was far inferior to Charles Fox. That great 
master of persuasive reasoning never failed to make every 
sentence tell upon his hearers, to employ precisely and in- 
variably the kind of arguments that were most level with 
their understandings, to subordinate every other considera- 
tion to the single end of convincing and impressing those 
who were before him. Burke was not inferior to Fox in 
readiness and in the power of clear and cogent reasoning. 
His wit, though not of the highest order, was only equaled 
by that of Townshend, Sheridan, and perhaps North, and 
it rarely failed in its effect upon the House. He far sur- 
passed every other speaker in the copiousness and correct- 
ness of his diction, in the range of knowledge he brought 
to bear on every subject of debate, in the richness and vari- 
ety of his imagination, in the gorgeous beauty of his de- 
scriptive passages, in the depth of the philosophical reflec- 
tions and the felicity of the personal sketches which he de- 
lighted in scattering over his speeches. But these gifts were 
frequently marred by a strange want of judgment, measure, 
and self-control. 

His speeches were full of episodes and digressions, of ex- 
cessive ornamentation and illustration, of dissertations on 



374 GREAT LEADERS. 

general principles of politics, which were invaluable in them- 
selves, but very unpalatable to a tired or excited house wait- 
ing eagerly for a division. As Grattan once said, " they 
were far better suited to a patient reader than an impatient 
hearer." Passionately in earnest in the midst of a careless 
or half-hearted assembly, seeking in all measures their essen- 
tial and permanent tendencies, while his hearers though 
chiefly of their transient and personal aspects, discussing 
first principles and remote consequences, among men whose 
minds were concentrated on the struggle of the hour, con- 
stantly led away by the endless stream of ideas and images 
which were forever surging from his brain, he was often 
interrupted by his impatient hearers. There is scarcely a 
perceptible difference between the style of his essays and 
the style of his published speeches ; and if the reader selects 
from his works the few passages which possess to an emi- 
nent degree the flash and movement of spoken rhetoric, he 
will be quite as likely to find them in the former as in the 
latter. 

Like most men of great imaginative power, he possessed 
a highly strung and oversensitive nervous organization, and 
the incessant conflicts of parliamentary life brought it at last 
into a condition of irritability that was wholly morbid and 
abnormal. Though eminently courteous and amenable to 
reason in private life, in public he was often petulant, in- 
tractable, and ungovernably violent. His friends sometimes 
held him down by the skirts of his coat to restrain the out- 
bursts of his anger. He spoke with a burning brain and with 
quivering nerves. The rapid, vehement, impetuous torrent 
of his eloquence, kindling as it flowed and the nervous mo- 
tions of his countenance reflected the ungovernable excite- 
ment under which he labored ; and while Fox could cast off 
without an effort the cares of public life and pass at once 
from Parliament to a night of dissipation at Brooks's, Burke 
returned from debate jaded, irritated, and soured. 

With an intellect capable of the very highest efforts of 



EDMUND BURKE. 375 

judicial wisdom he combined the passions of the most vio- 
lent partisan, and in the excitement of debate these too oft- 
en obtained the ascendency. Few things are more curious 
than the contrast between the feverish and passionate ex- 
citement with which he threw himself into party debates 
and the admirably calm, exhaustive, and impartial summa- 
ries of the rival arguments which he afterward drew up for 
the " Annual Register." Though a most skillful and pene- 
trating critic, and though his English style is one of the 
very finest in the language, his taste was not pure. Even 
his best writings are sometimes disfigured by strangely 
coarse and repulsive images, and gross violations of taste 
appear to have been frequent in his speeches. It is prob- 
able that in his case the hasty reports in the " Parliamentary 
History " and in the " Cavendish Debates " are more than 
commonly defective, for Burke was a very rapid speaker, 
and his language had the strongly marked individuality 
which reporters rarely succeed in conveying ; but no one who 
judged by these reports would place his speeches in the 
first rank, and some of them are wild and tawdry almost to 
insanity. 

Nor does he appear to have possessed any histrionic 
power. His voice had little charm. He had a strong Irish 
accent, and Erskine described his delivery as " execrable," 
and declared that in some of his finest speeches he emptied 
the house. 

Gerard Hamilton once said that while everywhere else 
Burke seemed the first man, in the House of Commons he 
appeared only the second. At the same time there is ample 
evidence that with all his defects he was from the first a 
great power in the House, and that in the early part of his 
career, and almost always on occasions of great importance, 
his eloquence had a wonderful power upon his hearers. Pitt 
passed into the House of Lords almost immediately after 
Burke had entered the Commons. Fox was then a boy ; 
Sheridan had not yet become a member ; and his fellow- 



376 GREAT LEADERS. 

countryman, Barre, though a rhetorician of great if some- 
what coarse power, was completely eclipsed by the splendor 
and the variety of the talents of Burke. Charles Towns- 
hend alone, who shone for a few years with a meteoric brill- 
iancy in English politics, was regarded as his worthy rival. 
Johnson wrote to Langton with great delight that Burke 
by his first speeches in the House had " gained more reputa- 
tion than perhaps any man at his first appearance ever 
gained before." 

" An Irishman, Mr. Burke, is sprung up," wrote the 
American General Lee, who was then watching London 
politics with great care, " who has astonished everybody with 
the power of his eloquence and his comprehensive knowl- 
edge in all our exterior and internal politics and commer- 
cial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity 
annexed to rank and property in England to make him the 
most considerable man in the Lower House." Grattan, who 
on a question of oratory was one of the most competent of 
judges, wrote in 1769, " Burke is unquestionably the first 
orator among the Commons of England, boundless in knowl- 
edge, instantaneous in his apprehensions, and abundant in 
his language. He speaks with profound attention and ac- 
knowledged superiority, notwithstanding the want of energy, 
the want of grace, and the want of elegance in his manner." 
Horace Walpole, who hated Burke, acknowledged that he 
was " versed in every branch of eloquence," that he possessed 
" the quickest conception, amazing facility of elocution, great 
strength of argumentation, all the power of imagination, and 
memory," that even his unpremeditated speeches displayed 
" a choice and variety of language, a profusion of metaphors, 
and a correctness of diction that was surprising," and that 
in public, though not in private life his wit was of the high- 
est order, " luminous, striking, and abundant." He com- 
plained, however, with good reason that he " often lost him- 
self in a torrent of images and copiousness," that " he dealt 
abundantly too much in establishing general positions," that 



EDMUND BURKE. 377 

he had " no address or insinuation " ; that his speeches often 
showed a great want of sobriety and judgment, and " the 
still greater want of art to touch the passions." 

But though their length, their excursiveness, and their 
didactic character did undoubtedly on many occasions weary 
and even empty the House, there were others in which 
Burke showed a power both of fascinating and of moving, 
such as very few speakers have attained. Gibbon, whose 
sinecure place was swept away by the Economical Reform 
Bill of 1782, bears testimony to the " delight with which 
that diffusive and ingenious orator, Mr. Burke, was heard 
by all sides of the House, and even by those whose existence 
he proscribed." Walpole has himself repeatedly noticed the 
effect which the speeches of Burke produced upon the hear- 
ers. Describing one of those against the American war, he 
says that the wit of one part " excited the warmest and most 
continued bursts of laughter even from Lord North, Rigby, 
and the ministers themselves," while the pathos of another 
part " drew iron tears down Barre's cheek," and Governor 
Johnston exclaimed that " he was now glad that strangers 
were excluded, as if they had been admitted Burke's speech 
would have excited them to tear ministers to pieces as they 
went out of the House." Sir Gilbert Elliot, describing one 
of Burke's speeches on the Warren Hastings impeachment, 
says : " He did not, I believe, leave a dry eye in the whole 
assembly." Making every allowance for the enthusiasm of 
a Erench Royalist for the author of the " Reflections on the 
French Revolution," the graphic description by the Duke de 
Levis of one of Burke's latest speeches on that subject is 
sufficient to show the magnetism of his eloquence even at 
the end of his career. " He made the whole House pass in 
an instant from the tenderest emotions of feeling to bursts 
of laughter ; never was the electric power of eloquence more 
imperiously felt. This extraordinary man seemed to raise 
and quell the passions of his auditors with as much ease and 
as rapidly as a skillful musician passes into the various mod- 



378 GREAT LEADERS. 

ulations of his harpsichord. I have witnessed many, too 
many political assemblages and striking scenes where elo- 
quence performed a noble part, but the whole of them ap- 
pear insipid when compared with this amazing effort." 



GEORGE WASHINGTON. 

By WILLIAM EDWARD IIARTPOLE LECKY. 

[Commander-in-chief of the American armies during the Kevolu- 
tion, and first President of the United States, born 1782, died 1799. 
Washington's first notable appearance in public life was in the Brad- 
dock expedition of 1755, when, at the age of twenty-three, as com- 
mander of the provincials in the British force, he saA^ed the remains 
of the defeated army. Thenceforward he became one of the most 
important figures in Virginia. After five years of military service he 
resigned his commission and retired to private life, except doing his 
duty as member of the Provincial Assembly. When the colonies took 
up arms, in 1775, Washington received the unanimous call to the chief 
command. At the close of hostilities General Washington resigned 
his commission and retired to Mount Vernon, shunning all connection 
with public affairs. He was made president of the Constitutional Con- 
vention of 1787, and on the promulgation of the Constitution, it was 
his transcendent popularity which was the most important influence 
in securing its ratification by the requisite number of States. Pie was 
elected first President, and served for two terms.] 

Perhaps the most diflficnlt question, however, was the 
appointment of a commander-in-chief; and on no other 
subject did the Congress exhibit more conspicuous wisdom. 
When only twenty-three, Washington had been appointed 
commander of the Virginian forces against the French ; and 
in the late war, though he had met with one serious disaster, 
and had no opportunity of obtaining any very brilliant 
military reputation, he had always shown himself an emi- 
nently brave and skillful soldier. His great modesty and 
taciturnity kept him in the background, both in the pro- 
vincial legislature and in the Continental Congress ; but 



GEORGE WASHINGTON, 3Y9 

tliougli his voice was scarcely ever heard in debate, his 
superiority was soon felt in the practical work of the com- 
mittees. "If you speak of solid information or sound 
judgment," said Patrick Henry about this time, " Colonel 
Washington is unquestionably the greatest man in the Con- 
gress." He appeared in the assembly in uniform, and in 
military matters his voice had an almost decisive weight. 
Several circumstances distinguished him from other officers, 
who in military service might have been his rivals. 

He was of an old American family. He was a planter 
of wealth and social position, and being a Virginian, his 
appointment was a great step toward enlisting that impor- 
tant colony cordially in the cause. The capital question now 
pending in America was, how far the other colonies would 
support New England in the struggle. In the preceding 
March, Patrick Henry had carried a resolution for embody- 
ing and reorganizing the Virginia militia, and had openly 
proclaimed that an appeal to arms was inevitable ; but as 
yet New England had borne almost the whole burden. 

The army at Cambridge was a New England army, and 
General Ward, who commanded it, had been appointed by 
Massachusetts. Even if Ward were superseded, there were 
many New England competitors for the post of commander ; 
the army naturally desired a chief of their own province, 
and there were divisions and hostilities among the New 
England deputies. The great personal merit of Washmgton 
and the great political importance of securing Vn'gmia, de- 
termined the issue; and the New England deputies ulti- 
mately took a leading part in the appointment. The second 
place was given to General Ward, and the third to Charles 
Lee, an English soldier of fortune who had lately purchased 
land in Virginia and embraced the American cause with 
great passion. Lee had probably a wider military experi- 
ence than any other officer in America, but he was a man 
of no settled principles, and his great talents were marred 
by a very irritable and capricious temper. 



380 GREAT LEADERS, 

To tlie appointment of Washington, far more than to 
any other single circumstance, is due the ultimate success 
of the American Revolution, though in purely intellectual 
powers Washington was certainly inferior to Franklin, 
and perhaps to two or three others of his colleagues. 
There is a theory which once received the countenance of 
some considerable physiologists, though it is now, I believe, 
completely discarded, that one of the great lines of division 
among men may be traced to the comparative development 
of the cerebrum and the cerebellum. To the first organ it 
was supposed belong those special gifts or powers which 
make men poets, orators, thinkers, artists, conquerors, or 
wits. To the second belong the superintending, restrain- 
ing, discerning, and directing faculties which enable men 
to employ their several talents with sanity and wisdom, 
which maintain the balance and the proportion of intellect 
and character, and make sound judgments and well-regu- 
lated lives. The theory, however untrue in its physiological 
aspect, corresponds to a real distinction in human minds 
and characters, and it was especially in the second order of 
faculties that Washington excelled. His mind was not 
quick or remarkably original. His conversation had no 
brilliancy or wit. He was entirely without the gift of elo- 
quence, and he had very few accomplishments. He knew 
no language but his own, and except for a rather strong 
turn for mathematics, he had no taste which can be called 
purely intellectual. There was nothing in him of the 
meteor or the cataract, nothing that either dazzled or over- 
powered. A courteous and hospitable country gentleman, 
a skillful farmer, a very keen sportsman, he probably differed 
little in tastes and habits from the better members of the 
class to which he belonged ; and it was in a great degree 
in the administration of a large estate and in assiduous atten- 
tion to county and provincial business that he acquired his 
rare skill in reading and managing men. 

As a soldier the circumstances of his career brought him 



GEORGE WASHINGTON. 381 

into the blaze not only of domestic, but of foreign criti- 
ci™,and it wasonly very gradually that h s supenonty jvas 
uUy reeognized. Lee, who of all American soldiers had 
Been most service in the English army, and Conway, who 
had risen to great repute in the Frendr army were both 
accustomed to speak of his military talents with extreme 
disparagement; but personal jealousy and animosi y un- 
doubtelly colored their judgments. Kalb, who had been 
trained in the best military schools of the Continent, at 
first pronounced him to be very deficient m the strength, 
decision, and promptitude of a general; and although he 
soon learned to form the highest estimate of his military 
capacity, he continued to lament that an excessive modesty 
led hini too frequently to act upon the opinion of inferior 
men, rather than upon his own most excellent 3udgment. 
In the army and the Congress more than one riva was op- 
posed to him. He had his full share of disaster ; the oper- 
ations which he conducted, if compared with great Euro- 
pean wars, were on a very small scale; and he had the 
immense advantage of encountering in most cases generals 

of singular incapacity. , , , . -vi ,„ 

It may, however, be truly said of him that his military 
reputation steadily rose through many successive campaigns 
and before the end of the struggle he had outlived al 
rivalry, and almost all envy. He had a thorough knowledge 
of the technical part of his profession, a good eye for mili- 
tary combinations, and an extraordinary gift of military ad- 
ministration. Punctual, methodical, and exact m the high- 
est degree, he excelled in managing those minute details 
which are so essential to the efficiency of an army, and he 
possessed to an eminent degree not only the common cour- 
age of a soldier, but also that much rarer form o courage 
which can endure long-continued suspense, bear the weight 
of great responsibility, and encounter the risks of misrepre- 
sentation and unpopularity. For several years, and usuaUy 
in the neighborhood of superior forces, he commanded a per- 



382 GREAT LEADERS, 

petually fluctuating army, almost wholly destitute of disci- 
pline and respect for authority, torn by the most violent per- 
sonal and provincial jealousies, wretchedly armed, wretched- 
ly clothed, and sometimes in imminent danger of starvation. 
Unsupported for the most part by the population among 
whom he was quartered, and incessantly thwarted by the 
jealousy of Congress, he kept his army together by a com- 
bination of skill, firmness, patience, and judgment which 
has rarely been surpassed, and he led it at last to a signal 
triumph. 

In civil as in military life, he was pro-eminent among 
his contemporaries for the clearness and soundness of his 
judgment, for his perfect moderation and self-control, for 
the quiet dignity and the indomitable firmness with which 
he pursued every path which he had deliberately chosen. Of 
all the great men in history he was the most invariably 
judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or 
judgment recorded of him. Those who knew him well, 
noticed that he had keen sensibilities and strong passions ; 
but his power of self-command never failed him, and no act 
of his public life can be traced to personal caprice, ambi- 
tion, or resentment. In the despondency of long-continued 
failure, in the elation of sudden success, at times when his 
soldiers were deserting by hundreds and when malignant 
plots were formed against his reputation, amid the constant 
quarrels, rivalries, and jealousies of his subordinates, in the 
dark hour of national ingratitude, and in the midst of the 
most universal and intoxicating flattery, he was always the 
same calm, wise, just, and single-minded man, pursuing the 
course which he believed to be right, without fear or favor 
or fanaticism ; equally free from the passions that spring 
from interest and from the passions that spring from im- 
agination. He never acted on the impulse of an absorb- 
ing or uncalculating enthusiasm, and he valued very highly 
fortune, position, and reputation ; but at the command of 
duty he was ready to risk and sacrifice them all. 



GEORGE WASHINGTON. 383 

He was in the highest sense of the words a gentleman 
and a man of honor, and he carried into public life the 
severest standard of private morals. It was at first the con- 
stant dread of large sections of the American people that if 
the old government were overthrown, they would fall into 
the hands of military adventurers, and undergo the yoke of 
military despotism. It was mainly the transparent integrity 
of the character of Washington that dispelled the fear. It 
was always known by his friends, and it was soon acknowl- 
edged by the whole nation and by the English themselves, 
that in Washington America had found a leader who could 
be induced by no earthly motive to tell a falsehood, or to 
break an engagement, or to commit any dishonorable act. 
Men of this moral type are happily not rare, and we have 
all met them in our experience ; but there is scarcely another 
instance in history of such a man having reached and main- 
tained the highest position in the convulsions of civil war 
and of a great popular agitation. 

It is one of the great advantages of the long practice of 
free institutions, that it diffuses through the community a 
knowledge of character and a soundness of judgment which 
save it from the enormous mistakes that are almost always 
made by enslaved nations when suddenly called upon to 
choose their rulers. No fact shows so eminently the high 
intelligence of the men who managed the American Revo- 
lution as their selection of a leader whose qualities were so 
much more solid than brilliant, and who was so entirely free 
from all the characteristics of a demagogue. It was only 
slowly and very deliberately that Washington identified 
himself with the revolutionary cause. 

No man had a deeper admiration for the British con- 
stitution, or a more sincere wish to preserve the connection 
and to put an end to the disputes between the two countries. 
In Virginia the revolutionary movement was preceded and 
prepared by a democratic movement of the yeomanry of the 
province, led by Patrick Henry, against the planter aristoc- 



384 GREAT LEAVERS, 

racy, and Washington was a conspicuous member of the 
latter. In tastes, manners, instincts, and sympathies he 
might have been taken as an admirable specimen of the 
better type of English country gentleman, and he had a 
great deal of the strong conservative feeling which is natural 
to the class. From the first pix)mulgation of the Stamp Act, 
however, he adopted a conviction that a recognition of the 
sole right of the colonies to tax themselves was essential to 
their freedom, and as soon as it became evident that Parlia- 
ment was resolved at all hazards to assert and exercise its 
authority of taxing America, he no longer hesitated. An 
interesting letter to his wife, however, shows clearly that he 
accepted the proffered command of the American forces 
with extreme diffidence and reluctance, and solely because 
he believed that it was impossible for him honorably to re- 
fuse it. He declined to accept from Congress any emolu- 
ments fo r his service beyond the simple payment of his 
expenses, of which he was accustomed to draw up most 
exact and methodical accounts. 



MIKABEAU. 

By THOMAS CAELYLE. 

[Count Gabriel Honore Riquetti, born 1749, died 1791 ; distin- 
guished as statesman and orator in the days preceding the French 
Revolution. The heir of a noble name, his early life was one of wild 
excess and eccentric adventure, but already marked by the intellectual 
daring and brilliancy which afterward made his name famous. In 
1789 he was elected to the States-General from Aix as representative, 
however, of the Third Estate (the Commons), not of the nobility to 
which he belonged. Already strongly infected by liberal theories, his 
energy, intellectual power and eloquence soon made him the foremost 
figure in the great legislative body. At first antagonistic to royal pre- 
tension, he finally recognized the dangers of the coming revolution at 
an early stage, and attempted to stem the current. His efforts to 
reconcile clashing interests from 1789 to 1791 were characterized by 



MIRABEAU. 3S5 

the most splendid powers of the orator and statesman. His premature 
death removed the only barrier to the rising revolutionary tide. He 
was the idol of the populace, and it is believed by many historians 
that, had he lived, the French Revolution would have flowed in a dif- 
ferent channel.] 

Which of these six hundred individuals, in plain white 
cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one 
guess would become their king ? For a king or leader they, 
as all bodies of men, must have ; be their work what it may, 
there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, 
is fittest of all to do it ; that man, as future not yet elected 
king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black 
locks, will it be ? With the hure, as himself calls it, or black 
hoards-head^ fit to be " shaken " as a senatorial portent ? 
Through whose shaggy beetle - brows, and rough-hewed, 
seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small- 
pox, incontinence, bankruptcy — and burning fire of genius ; 
like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confu- 
sions ? It is Gahriel Honore Riquetti Miraheau^ the world- 
compeller ; man-ruling deputy of Aix ! According to the 
Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along, though looked at 
askance here ; and shakes his black chevelure, or lion's-mane, 
as if prophetic of great deeds. 

Yes, reader, that is the type- Frenchman of this epoch ; 
as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, 
acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices ; perhaps more French 
than any other man — and intrinsically such a mass of man- 
hood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were 
all different without that one ; nay, he might say with the 
old despot : " The National Assembly? I am that." 

Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood ; for the 
Eiquettis, or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the 
Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence, where 
from generation to generation they have ever approved 
themselves a peculiar kindred ; irascible, indomitable, sharp- 
cutting, true, like the steel they wore ; of an intensity and 
17 



386 GREAT LEADERS. 

activity that sometimes verged toward madness, yet did not 
reach it. One ancient Kiquetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad 
vow, chains two mountains together ; and the chain, with its 
" iron star of five rays," is still to be seen. May not a mod- 
ern Riquetti tnzchain so much, and set it drifting — which 
also shall be seen ? 

Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau ; 
Destiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did 
not his grandfather, stout Col-d' Argent ( Silver - Stock, so 
they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-and -twenty 
wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together on the bridge at 
Casano ; while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and regal- 
loped over him — only the flying sergeant had thrown a 
camp-kettle over that loved head ; and Vendome, dropping 
his spy-glass, moaned out, " Mirabeau is dead^ then ! " Nev- 
ertheless he was not dead : he awoke to breath, and miracu- 
lous surgery — for Gabriel was yet to be. With his silver- 
stock he kept his scarred head erect, through long years ; and 
wedded ; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the Friend 
of Men. Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this 
long-expected rough-hewed Gabriel Honore did likewise see 
the light ; roughest lion's whelp ever littered of that rough 
breed. How the old lion (for our old marquis too was lion- 
like, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed 
wondering on his offspring ; and determined to train him as 
no lion had yet been ! It is in vain, oh Marquis ! This cub, 
though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw 
in dogcart of political economy, and be a Friend of Men ; 
he will not be thou, but must and will be himself, another 
than thou. Divorce lawsuits, "whole family save one in 
prison, and three-score Lettres-de- Cachet " for thy own sole 
use, do but astonish the world. 

Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has 
been in the Isle of Rhe and heard the Atlantic from his 
tower ; in the castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at 
Marseilles. He has been in the fortress of Joux, and forty- 



MIR ABE AU. 387 

two months, with hardly clothing to his hack, in the dun- 
geon of Vincennes — all by Lettre-de- Cachet from his lion 
father. He has been in Pontarlier jails (self-constituted 
prisoner) ; was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low 
water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded 
before Aix parliaments (to get back his wife) ; the public 
gathering on roofs, to see since they could not hear ; " the 
clatter-teeth {claque-dents) ! " snarls singular old Mirabeau, 
discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but 
two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of 
the drum species. 

But as for Gabriel Honore, in these strange wayfarings, 
what has he not seen and tried ! From drill-sergeants to 
prime-ministers, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all 
manner of men he has seen. All manner of men he has 
gained ; for, at bottom, it is a social, loving heart, that wild, 
unconquerable one — more especially all manner of women. 
From the archer's daughter at Saintes to that fair young 
Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could not but " steal," 
and be beheaded for — in effigy ! For, indeed, hardly since 
the Arabian prophet lay dead to All's admiration was there 
seen such a love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In 
war, again, he has helped to conquer Corsica ; fought duels, 
irregular brawls ; horsewhipped calumnious barons. In lit- 
erature, he has written on " Despotism," on " Lettres-de- 
Cachet " ; Erotics Sapphic- Werterean, Obscenities, Profani- 
ties ; books on the " Prussian Monarchy," on " Cagliostro," 
on " Calonne," on " The Water-Companies of Paris " — each 
book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarm-fire ; 
huge, smoky, sudden! The fire-pan, the kindling, the 
bitumen were his own ; but the lumber, of rags, old wood 
and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), 
was gathered from hucksters and ass -panniers of every 
description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters 
enough have been heard to exclaim : Out upon it, the fire 
is mine! 



GREAT LEADERS. 

Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a 
talent for borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man 
he can make his ; the man himself he can make his. " All 
reflex and echo (tout de reflet et cle reverhere) ! " snarls old 
Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend 
of Men ! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature ; and will 
now be the quality of qualities for him. In that forty years' 
"struggle against despotism" he has gained the glorious 
faculty of self-help, and yet riot lost the glorious natural gift 
of felloiv ship, of being helped. Rare union; this man can 
live self-sufficing — yet lives also in the life of other men ; 
can make men love him, work with him ; a born king of 
men ! 

But consider further how, as the old marquis still snarls, 
he has " made away with {liume, swallowed, snuffed-up) all 
formulas " — a fact, which, if we meditate it, will in these 
days mean much. This is no man of system, then ; he is 
only a man of instincts and insights. A man, nevertheless, 
who will glare fiercely on any object, and see through it and 
conquer it ; for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond 
other men. A man not with logic-spectacles, but with an eye ! 
Unhappily without decalogue, moral code, or theorem of 
any fixed sort, yet not without a strong living soul in him, 
and sincerity there ; a reality, not an artificiality, not a 
sham ! And so he, having struggled " forty years against 
despotism," and " made away with all formulas," shall now 
become the spokesman of a nation bent to do the same. 
For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off 
despotism; to make away with her old formulas — having 
found them naught, worn out, far from the reality ? She 
will make away with such formulas — and even go lare, if 
need be, till she have found new ones. 

Toward such work, in such manner, marches he, this 
singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with 
black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along 
there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be choked 



CHARLES JA3IES FOX. 389 

and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And 
now it has got air ; it will burn its whole substance, its 
whole smoke-atmosphere, too, and fill all France with flame. 
Strange lot ! Forty years of that smoldering, with foul fire- 
damp and vapor enough ; then victory over that — and like a 
burning mountain he blazes heaven-high ; and for tAventy- 
three resplendent months pours out in flame and molten 
fire-torrents all that is in him, the Pharos and wonder-sign 
of an amazed Europe— and then lies hollow, cold forever ! 
Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the greatest of 
them all ; in the whole national deputies, in the whole na- 
tion, there is none like and none second to thee. 



CHAKLES JAMES FOX. 

By WILLIAM EDWAED HAETPOLE LECKY. 

[An eminent orator and statesman, born 1749, died 1806. Fox was 
noted as being- the greatest man of his age in parliamentary debate. 
He was the son of Sir Henry Fox, afterward Lord Holland, and was 
elected to Parliament while scarcely yet of age. Fox was identified 
with the Whig party, and contributed greatly to the success and firm 
establishment of liberal and reform principles in politics, though his 
private life was careless and dissolute. Though peerless as a debater, 
Fox was unsuccessful in commanding public respect and confidence 
during his short experiment as premier, and was for the most of his 
career a leader of the opposition. The memory of Fox is endeared 
to Americans by his sympathy with our revolutionary struggle, his 
persistent efforts to prevent the war before it began, and to secure 
an early concession of American independence after the beginning of 
hostilities.! 

Charles James Fox was the third son of the first 
Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parlia- 
ment irregularly and illegally in November, 1768, when he 
had not yet completed his twentieth year, and in February, 
1770, he had been made a lord of the admiralty in the 



390 GREAT LEADERS. 

Government of Lord North. The last political connection 
of Lord Holland had been with Bute, and his son appears 
to have accepted the heritage of his Tory principles without 
inquiry or reluctance. His early life was in the highest 
degree discreditable, and gave very little promise of great- 
ness. His vehement and passionate temperament threw 
him speedily into the wildest dissipation, and the almost 
insane indulgence of his- father gratified his every whim. 
When he was only fourteen Lord Holland had brought him 
to the gambling-table at Spa, and, at a time when he had 
hardly reached manhood, he was one of the most desperate 
gamblers of his day. Lord Holland died in 1774, but before 
his death he is said to have paid no less than one hundred 
and forty thousand pounds in extricating his son from 
gambling debts. The death of his mother and the death 
of his elder brother in the same year brought him a con- 
siderable fortune, including an estate in the Isle of Thanet 
and the sinecure office of clerk of the pells in Ireland, 
which was worth two thousand three hundred pounds a 
year ; but in a short time he was obliged to sell or mortgage 
everything he possessed. He himself nicknamed his ante- 
chamber the Jerusalem Chamber from the multitude of 
Jews who haunted it. Lord Carlisle was at one time security 
for him to the extent of fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds. 
During one of the most critical debates in 1781 his house 
was in the occupation of the sheriffs. He was even debtor 
for small sums to chairmen and to waiters at Brooks's ; and 
although in the latter part of his life he was partly relieved 
by a large subscription raised by his friends, he never ap- 
pears to have wholly emerged from the money difficulties 
in which his gambling tastes had involved him. Nor was 
this his only vice. 

With some men the passion for gambling is an irresisti- 
ble moral monomania, the single morbid taint in a nature 
otherwise faultless and pure. With Fox it was but one of 
many forms of an insatiable appetite for vicious excitement, 



CHARLES JA31ES FOX. 391 

which continued with little abatement during many years of 
his public career. In 1777, during a long visit to Paris, he 
lived much in the society of Madame du Deffand, and that 
very acute judge of character formed an opinion of him 
which was, on the whole, very unfavorable. He has much 
talent, she said, much goodness of heart and natural truth- 
fulness, but he is absolutely without principle, he has a con- 
tempt for every one who has principle, he lives in a perpetual 
intoxication of excitement, he never gives a thought to the 
morrow, he is a man eminently fitted to corrupt youth. In 
1779, when he was already one of the foremost politicians in 
England, he was one night drinking at Almack's with Lord 
Derby, Major Stanley, and a few other young men of rank, 
when they determined at three in the morning to make a 
tour through the streets, and amused themselves by insti- 
gating a mob to break the windows of the chief members 
of the Government. 

His profligacy with women during a great part of his life 
was notorious, though he appears at last to have confined him- 
self to his connection with Mrs. Armistead, whom he secretly 
married in September, 1795. He was the soul of a group 
of brilliant and profligate spendthrifts, who did much to 
dazzle and corrupt the fashionable youth of the time ; and 
in judging the intense animosity with which George III 
always regarded him, it must not be forgotten that his ex- 
ample and his friendship had probably a considerable influ- 
ence in encouraging the Prince of Wales in those vicious 
habits and in that undutiful course of conduct which pro- 
duced so much misery in the palace and so much evil in the 
nation. One of the friends of Charles Fox summed up his 
whole career in a few significant sentences. " He had three 
passions — women, play, and politics. Yet he never formed 
a creditable connection with a woman. He squandered 
all his means at the gaming-table, and, except for eleven 
months, he was invariably in opposition." 

That a man of whom all this can be truly said should 



392 GREAT LEADERS. 

have taken a high and honorable place in English history, 
and should have won for himself the perennial love and loy- 
alty of some of the best Englishmen of his time, is not a 
little surprising, for a life such as I have described would 
with most men have destroyed every fiber of intellectual 
energy and of moral worth. But in truth there are some 
characters which nature has so happily compounded that 
even vice is unable wholly to degrade them, and there is a 
charm of manner and of temper which sometimes accom- 
panies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more 
popularity in the world than the purest and the most self- 
denying virtue. Of this truth Fox was an eminent example. 
With a herculean frame, with iron nerves, with that happy 
vividness and buoyancy of temperament that can ever throw 
itself passionately into the pursuits and the impressions of 
the hour, and can then cast them aside without an effort, he 
combined one of the sweetest of human tempers, one of the 
warmest of human hearts. 

Nothing in his career is more remarkable than the spell 
which he cast over men who in character and principles 
were as unlike as possible to himself. " He is a man," said 
Burke, " made to be loved, of the most artless, candid, open, 
and benevolent disposition ; disinterested in the extreme, of 
a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of 
gall in his whole constitution." "The power of a superior 
man," said Gibbon, " was blended in his attractive character 
with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no 
human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint 
of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood." *' He possessed," said 
Erskine, " above all men I ever knew, the most gentle, and 
yet the most ardent spirit." He retained amid all his vices 
a capacity for warm and steady friendship, a capacity for 
struggling passionately and persistently in opposition, for an 
unpopular cause ; a purity of taste and a love of literature 
which made him, with the exception of Burke, the foremost 
scholar among the leading members of the House of Com- 



CHARLES JAMES FOX. 

mons ; an earnestness, disinterestedness, and simplicity of 
character which was admitted and admired even by his po- 
litical opponents. 

He resembled Bolingbroke in his power of passing at 
once from scenes of dissipation into the House of Commons, 
and in retaining in public affairs during the most disorderly 
periods of his private life all his soundness of judgment and 
all his force of eloquence and of decision. Gibbon described 
how he "prepared himself" for one important debate by 
spending twenty-two previous hours at the hazard table and 
losing eleven thousand pounds. Walpole extols the extraor- 
dinary brilliancy of the speech which he made on another 
occasion, when he had but just arrived from Newmarket 
and had been sitting up drinking the whole of the preced- 
ing night, and he states that in the early period of his brill- 
iant opposition to the American policy of North he was 
rarely in bed before five in the morning, or out of it before 
two in the afternoon. Yet, like Bolingbroke, he never lost 
the taste and passion for study even at the time when he 
was most immersed in a life of pleasure. 

At Eton and Oxford he had been a very earnest student, 
and few of his contemporaries can have had a wider knowl- 
edge of the imaginative literatures of Greece, Italy, or 
France. He was passionately fond of poetry, and a singu- 
larly delicate and discriminating critic ; but he always looked 
upon literature chiefly from its ornamental and imaginative 
side. Incomparably the most important book relating to 
the art of government which appeared during his lifetime 
was the " Wealth of Nations," but Fox once owned that he 
had never read it ; and the history which was his one serious 
composition added nothing to his reputation. In books, 
however, he found an unfailing solace in trouble and disap- 
pointment. One morning, when one of his friends having 
heard that Fox on the previous night had been completely 
ruined at the gaming-table, went to visit and console him, 
he found him tranquilly reading Herodotus in the original. 



394 GREAT LEADERS. 

" What," he said, " would you have a man do who has lost 
his last shilling ? " 

His merits as a politician can only be allowed with great 
deductions and qualifications. But little stress should in- 
deed be laid on the sudden and violent change in his politi- 
cal principles, which was faintly foreshadowed in 1772 and 
fully accomplished in 1774, though that change did un- 
doubtedly synchronize with his personal quarrel with Lord 
North. Changes of principle and policy, which at forty or 
fifty would indicate great instability of character, are very 
venial at twenty-four or twenty-five, and from the time 
when Fox joined the Whig party his career through long 
years of adversity and of trial was singularly consistent. I 
can not, however, regard a politician either as a great states- 
man or a great party leader who left so very little of perma- 
nent value behind him, who offended so frequently and so 
bitterly the national feelings of his countrymen, who on two 
memorable occasions reduced his party to the lowest stage 
of depression, and who failed so signally during a long pub- 
lic life in winning the confidence of the nation. 

His failure is the more remarkable as one of the features 
most conspicuous both in his speeches and his letters is the 
general soundness of his judgment, and his opinions during 
the greater part of his life were singularly free from every 
kind of violence, exaggeration, and eccentricity. Much of 
it was due to his private life, much to his divergence from 
popular opinion on the American question and on the ques- 
tion of the French Revolution, and much also to an extraor- 
dinary deficiency in the art of party management, and to 
the frequent employment of language which, though emi- 
nently adapted to the immediate purposes of debate, was 
certain from its injudicious energy to be afterward quoted 
against him. Like more than one great master of words, 
he was trammeled and injured at every stage of his career 
by his own speeches. The extreme shock which the disas- 
trous coalition of 1784 gave to the public opinion of Eng- 



CHARLES JAMES FOX. 395 

land was largely, if not mainly, due to the outrageous vio- 
lence of the language with which Fox had in the preceding 
vears denounced Lord North, and a similar violence made 
his breach with the court irrevocable, and greatly aggra- 
vated his difference with the nation on the question of the 

French Revolution. ^ , j • t, , 

But if his rank as a statesman and as a party leader is by 
no means of the highest order, he stood, by the concurrent 
testimony of all his contemporaries, in the very first line if 
not in the very first place, among English parliamentary de- 
haters. He threw the whole energy of his character mto 
his career, and he practiced it continually till he attained a 
dexterity in debate which to his contemporaries appeared 
little less than miraculous. "During five whole sessions, 
he once said, "I spoke every night but one and 1 regret 
only that I did not speak on that night." ^\ ith a de ivery 
that in the beginning of his speeches was somewhat slow 
and hesitating, with little method, with great repetition 
with no grace of gesture, with an utter indifference to the 
mere oratory of display, thinking of nothing but how o 
convince and persuade the audience who were immediately 
before him, never for a moment forgetting the vital issue, 
never employing an argument which was not complete y 
level with the apprehensions of his audience, he possessed to 
the very highest degree the debating qualities which an edu- 
cated political assembly of Englishmen most highly value 

The masculine vigor and strong common sense ot his 
arguments, his unfailing lucidity, his P«^J.«'- f .f .'^''P^^f, ™ 
a moment the essential issue of a debate, his skill m hitting 
blots and throwing the arguments on his own side into the 
most vivid and various lights, his marvelous memory m 
catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare com- 
bination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of 
style with the closest and most transparent reasonmg, and 
the air of intense conviction which he threw ^-tofveij dis- 
cussion, had never been surpassed. He was one of the fair- 



396 GREAT LEADERS, 

est of debaters, and it was said that the arguments of his 
opponents were very rarely stated with such masterly power 
as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with, and 
to overthrow them. 

He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called 
the power of " declaiming argument," and that combination 
of rapidity and soundness of judgment which is the first 
quality of a debater. " Others," said Sir George Savile, 
" may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money 
about him than any of his party." " I believe," said Lord 
Carlisle, " there never was a person yet created who had the 
faculty of reasoning like him." "Nature," said Horace 
Walpole, " had made him the most wonderful reasoner of 
the age." " He possessed beyond all moderns," wrote Mack- 
intosh, "that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence 
which formed the prince of orators." " Had he been bred 
to the bar," wrote Philip Francis, " he would in my judg- 
ment have made himself in a shorter time, and with much 
less application than any other man, the most powerful liti- 
gant that ever appeared there." " He rose by slow degrees," 
said Burke, " to be the most brilliant and accomplished de- 
bater the world ever saw." His finest speeches were wholly 
unpremeditated, and the complete subordination in them of 
all rhetorical and philosophical ambition to the immediate 
purpose of the debate has greatly impaired their permanent 
value ; but, even in the imperfect fragments that remain, 
the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen. 



JEAIST PAUL MARAT. 

By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. 

[A leader of the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, born in 
1744, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793. His energy and fe- 
rocity ^ade him a power, which he never could have become by his 
talents. He was the right hand of Robespierre, and the principal agent 
in the destruction of the Girondist party in 1793. With Danton and 



JEAN PAUL 31ARAT. 397 

Robespierre he formed the triumvirate which turned France into a 
vast human shambles.] 

Three men among the Jacobins — Marat, Danton, and 
Eobespierre — merited distinction and possessed authority. 
Owing to a malformation, or distortion, of head and heart, 
they fulfilled the requisite conditions. Of the three, Marat 
is the most monstrous ; he borders on the lunatic, of which 
he displays the chief characteristics — furious exaltation, con- 
stant overexcitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible 
propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and tet- 
anus of the will under the constraint and rule of a fixed 
idea, and, in addition to this, the usual physical symptoms, 
such as sleeplessness, a livid tint, had blood, foulness of dress 
and person, with, during the last five months of his life, 
irritations and eruptions over his whole body. Issuing from 
incongruous races, born of a mixed blood, and tainted with 
serious moral commotions, he harbors within him a singular 
germ ; physically he is an abortion, morally a pretender, and 
one Avho covets all places of distinction. 

His father, who was a physician, intended from his early 
childhood that he should be a savant ; his mother, an ideal- 
ist, meant that he should be a philanthropist, while he him- 
self always steered his course toward both summits. " At 
five years of age," he says, " it would have pleased me to be 
a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, 
and a creative genius at twenty," and afterward, up to the 
last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. " From my earliest 
infancy I had an intense love of fame, which changed its 
object at various stages of my life, but which never left me 
for a moment." He rambled over Europe or vegetated in 
Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate 
positions ; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of sci- 
ence, and ignored as a philosopher ; a third rate political 
writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, 
constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as con- 



398 GREAT LEADERS, 

stantly rejected — too great a disproportion between liis 
faculties and ambition. 

Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of medi- 
ocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of 
the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as 
professor or doctor, more or less bold and lucky, or to fol- 
low, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path 
clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such 
diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intel- 
lect. Never did man, after so many abortive speculations 
and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so 
high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in 
him augments the other ; through his faculty of not seeing 
things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and 
genius ; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he re- 
gards his misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths. 

Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own 
course and becomes complex ; next to the ambitious delirium 
comes the mania for persecution. In effect, the evident or 
demonstrated truths which he supplies should strike the 
public at once ; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing 
to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious ; mani- 
festly, they have conspired against him, and against him 
plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers' plot ; 
when his treatise on " Man " reached Paris from Amsterdam, 
" they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the 
book stopped at the custom-house." Next came the plot of 
the doctors, who " ruefully estimated my enormous gains. 
Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together 
to consider the best way to destroy my reputation." Finally, 
came the plot of the academicians ; " the disgraceful perse- 
cution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for 
two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on light 
upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite 
indifferent about becoming a member of its body. . . . 
"Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans sue- 



JEAN PAUL JlAliAT, 399 

ceeded in underrating my discoveries througliout Europe, 
in exciting every society of savants against me, and in clos- 
ing against me all the newspapers ! " Naturally, the would- 
be-persecuted man defends himself — that is to say, he at- 
tacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and 
put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates 
real ones, especially in politics, where, on principle, he daily 
preaches insurrection and murder. 

Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the 
Chatelet Court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and 
wander from one hiding-place to another ; to live like a bat 
" in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon " ; once, sa3^s 
his friend Panis, he passed " six weeks on one of his but- 
tocks," like a madman in his cell, face to face with his rev- 
eries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the 
reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, 
and at last settle down into a confirmed nightmare ; that, in 
his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, 
even in full daylight, men and things should seem awry, as 
in a magnifying, dislocating mirror ; that frequently, on the 
numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and 
his chronic disease too acute, his j^hysician should bleed him 
to arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a 
madman sees everywhere around him — on the floors, on the 
walls, on the ceiling — toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of 
crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing 
them, and the disease enters on its last stage ; after the am- 
bitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and the settled 
nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a 
few lives would have sufficed : " Five hundred heads ought 
to have fallen when the Bastile was taken, and all would 
then have gone on well." But, through lack of foresight 
and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more 
it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With 
the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions ; 
he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 



400 GREAT LEADERS. 

1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates approxi- 
matively forty thousand as the number of heads that should 
be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess having enor- 
mously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now 
demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always 
on the score of humanity, " to insure public tranquillity," on 
condition that the operation be intrusted to him, as the 
summary, temporary justiciary. Save this last point the 
rest is granted to him ; it is unfortunate that he could not 
see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his pro- 
gramme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary 
tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drown- 
ings of Nantes. From first to last he was in the right line 
of the revolution ; lucid on account of his blindness, thanks 
to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal 
malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his com- 
plete madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness 
of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, 
perched aloft, at the first bound, on the sharp pinnacle, 
which his rivals dared not climb, or only stumbled up. 



PEINCE TALLEYKAND. 

By ARCHIBALD ALISON. 

[Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, one of the most 
distinguished of modern French statesmen and diplomatists, born in 
1754, died in 1838. Originally a churchman, he became Bishop of Au- 
tun in 1788, though notorious for loose and licentious living. During 
the period of the revolution Talleyrand was in England and America. 
He returned to France in 1797, and under the Directory was called to 
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was of great assistance to Na- 
poleon in accomplishing his coup d'etat, and thenceforward was the 
French ruler's trusted adviser in all matters of state till 1807, when a 
coldness grew on Napoleon's part. Talleyrand's bitter and pungent 
criticisms on Napoleon's policy so enraged the emperor that he finally 
deprived him of his lucrative offices. In 1812 he foretold the coming 



PRINCE TALLEYRAND, 401 

downfall of Xapoleon, and the accomplishment of the prediction 
achieved for him the admiration of Europe. While the allies were 
advancing on Paris in 1814, Talleyrand was in secret communication 
with them. After the restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand took 
but little part in public affairs till 1830, when, as ambassador to Eng- 
land, he negotiated an important treaty settling the status of the penin- 
sula kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.] 

Xever was character more opposite to that of the Rus- 
sian autocrat than that of his great coadjutor in the pacifi- 
cation and settlement of Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This 
most remarkable man was born at Paris in 1754, so that in 
1814 he was already sixty years of age. He was descended 
of an old family, and had for his maternal aunt the cele- 
brated Princess of Ursius, who played so important a part 
in the war of the succession at the court of Philippe V.* 
Being destined for the Church, he early entered the semi- 
nary of St. Sulpice, and even there was remarkable for the 
delicate vein of sarcasm, nice discrimination, and keen pene- 
tration, for which he afterward became so distinguished in 
life. At the age of twenty- six he was appointed agent-gen- 
eral for the clergy, and in that capacity his administrative 
talents were so remarkable that they procured for him the 
situation of Bishop of Autun, which he held in 1789, when 
the revolution broke out. So remarkable had his talents 
become at this period that Mirabeau, in his secret corre- 
spondence with Berlin, pointed him out as one of the most 
eminent men of the age. 

He was elected representative of the clergy of his diocese 
for the Constitute Assembly, and was one of the first of that 
rank in the Church who voted on the 29th of May for the 
junction of the ecclesiastical body with the Tiers l^tat. He 
also took the lead in all the measures, then so popular, which 
had for their object to spoliate the Church, and apply its 
possessions to the service of the state ; accordingly, he him- 

* King of Spain. 



402 GREAT LEADERS. 

self proposed the snppressiou of tithes and the application 
of the property of the Church to the public treasury. In 
all these measures he was deaf to the remonstrances of the 
clergy whom he represented, and already he had severed all 
the cords which bound him to the Church. 

His ruling principle was not any peculiar enmity to re- 
ligion, but a fixed determination to adhere to the dominant 
party, whatever it was, whether in Church or state ; to 
watch closely the signs of the times, and throw in his lot 
with that section of the community which appeared likely 
to gain the superiority. In February, 1790, he was ap- 
pointed President of the Assembly, and from that time for- 
ward, down to its dissolution, he took a leading part in all 
its measures. He was not, however, an orator ; knowledge 
of men and prophetic sagacity were his great qualifications. 
Generally silent in the hall of debate, he soon gained the 
lead in the council of deliberation or committee of manage- 
ment. He officiated as constitutional bishop to the great 
scandal of the more orthodox clergy in the great fete on the 
14th of July, 1790, in the Champ de Mars; but he had 
already become fearful of the excesses of the popular party, 
and was, perhaps, the only person to whom Mirabeau on 
his deathbed communicated his secret views and designs for 
the restoration of the French monarchy. 

Early in 1792 he set out on a secret mission to London, 
where he remained till the breaking out of the war in Feb- 
ruary, 1793, and enjoyed much of the confidence of Mr. 
Pitt. He naturally enough became an object of jealousy to 
both parties, being denounced by the Jacobins as an emis- 
sary of the court, and by the Royalists as an agent of the 
Jacobins; and, in consequence, he was accused and con- 
demned in his absence, and only escaped by withdrawing 
to America, where he remained till 1795 engaged in com- 
mercial pursuits. It was not the least proof of his address 
and sagacity that he thus avoided equally the crimes and 
the dangers of the Reign of Terror, and returned to Paris 



PRINCE TALLEYRAND. 403 

at the close of that year with his head on his shoulders, and 
without deadly hostility to any party in his heart. 

His influence and abilities soon caused themselves to be 
felt ; the sentence of death, which had been recorded against 
him in his absence, was soon recalled ; he became a leading 
member of the Club of Salm, which in 1797 was established 
to counterbalance the efforts of the Royalists in the Club of 
Clicliy; and on the triumph of the revolutionists by the 
violence of Augereau in July, 1797, he was appointed Min- 
ister of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, aware of the imbe- 
cility of the directorial government, he entered warmly 
into the views of Napoleon, upon his return from Egypt, 
for its overthrow. He was again made Minister of Foreign 
Affairs by that youthful conqueror after the 18th Bru- 
maire, and continued, with some few interruptions, to be 
the soul of all foreign negotiations and the chief director 
of foreign policy, down to the measures directed against 
Spain in 1807. On that occasion, however, his wonted 
sagacity did not desert him ; he openly disapproved of the 
attack on the peninsula, and was, in consequence, dismissed 
from office, which he did not again hold till he was ap- 
pointed chief of the provisional government on the 1st of 
April, 1814. He had thus the singular address, though a 
leading character under both regimes^ to extricate himself 
both from the crimes of the revolution and the misfortunes 
of the Empire. 

He was no ordinary man who could accomplish so great 
a prodigy and yet retain such influence as to step, as it were, 
by common consent into the principal direction of affairs 
on the overthrow of Napoleon. His power of doing so 
depended not merely on his great talents; they alone, if 
unaccompanied by other qualifications, would inevitably 
have brought him to the guillotine under the first govern- 
ment or the prisons of state under the last. It was his ex- 
traordinary versatility and flexibility of disposition, and the 
readiness with which he accommodated himself to every 



404: GREAT LEADERS. 

change of government and dynasty which he thought likely 
to be permanent, that mainly contributed to this extraordi- 
nary result. Such was his address that, though the most 
changeable character in the whole revolution, he contrived 
never to lose either influence or reputation by all his ter- 
giversations ; but, on the contrary, went on constantly rising 
to the close of his career, when above eighty years of age, in 
weight, fortune, and consideration. 

The very fact of his having survived, both in person and 
influence, so many changes of government, which had proved 
fatal to almost all his contemporaries, of itself constituted a 
colossal reputation ; and when he said, with a sarcastic smile, 
on taking the oath of fidelity to Louis Philippe in 1830, " C^est 
le treisieme^^'' the expression, repeated from one end of Eu- 
rope to the other, produced a greater admiration for his 
address than indignation at his perfidy. 

He has been well described as the person in existence 
who had the least hand in producing, and the greatest power 
of profiting, by revolutions. He was not destitute of orig- 
inal thought, but wholly without the generous feeling, the 
self-forgetfulness, which prompt the great in character as 
well as talent to bring forth their conceptions in word or 
action, at whatever hazard to themselves or their fortunes. 
His object always was not to direct, but to observe and guide 
the current ; he never opposed it when he saw it was irre- 
sistible, nor braved its dangers where it threatened to be 
perilous, but quietly withdrew until an opportunity occurred, 
by the destruction alike of its supporters and its opponents, 
to obtain its direction. In this respect his talents very 
closely resembled those of Metternich, of whom a character 
has already been drawn ; but he was less consistent than the 
wary Austrian diplomatist, and, though equaled by him in 
dissimulation, he was far his superior in perfidy. 

It cost him nothing to contradict and violate his oaths 
whenever it suited his interest to do so, and the extraordi- 
nary and almost unbroken success of his career affords, as 



GEORGE JACQUES DANTON, 405 

well as that of Napoleon, the most striking confirmation of 
the profound saying of Johnson — that no man ever raised 
himself from private life to the supreme direction of affairs, 
in whom great abilities were not combined with certain 
meannesses, which would have proved altogether fatal to 
him in ordinary life. 

Yet was he without any of the great vices of the revolu- 
tion ; his selfishness was constant, his cupidity unbounded, 
his hands often sullied by gold, but he was not cruel or un- 
forgiving in his disposition, and few, if any, deeds of blood 
stain his memory. His witticisms and hon mots were ad- 
mirable, and repeated from one end of Europe to the other ; 
yet was his reputation in this respect, perhaps, greater than 
the reality, for, by common consent, every good saying at 
Paris during his life-time was ascribed to the ex-Bishop of 
Autun. But none perhaps more clearly reveals his charac- 
ter and explains his success in life than the celebrated one, 
" That the principal object of language is to conceal the 
thought." 

GEOKGE JACQUES DANTOK 

By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. 

[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759, exe- 
cuted 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent measures, or- 
ganized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was principally instru- 
mental in bringing on the dreadful September massacres of the 
same year, when all those confined in the Paris prisons were slaught- 
ered. On being elected to the convention, he was foremost in forc- 
ing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as a member of the Com- 
mittee of Pubhe Safety, in breaking the power of the Girondists, 
though he would have spared their lives. He incurred the hate of 
Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and moderation which 
would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and was sent to the 
scaJffoId by the plots of his cunning and implacable adversary.] 

Between" the demagogue and the highwayman the re- 
semblance is close; both are leaders of bands, and each 



406 GREAT LEADERS, 

requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to 
organize his band, required the revolution. " Of low birth, 
without a patron," penniless, every office being filled, and 
" the Paris bar unattainable," admitted a lawyer after " a 
struggle," he for a long time strolled about the streets with- 
out a brief, or frequented the coffee-houses, the same as simi- 
lar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops. At the Cafe de 
I'Ecole, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow " in a small 
round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm," cir- 
culated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter 
sat in the rear as cashier. Danton chatted with her, and 
demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her he had to 
mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the 
Eoyal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his 
small native town. 

Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, 
" more burdened with debts than with causes," tied down 
to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous applica- 
tion, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style, and 
blameless deportment ; obliged to keep house on so small a 
scale that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced 
to him each week by his cofiee-house father-in-law, he could 
not make both ends meet ; his free-and-easy tastes, his alter- 
nately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of en- 
joyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent in- 
stincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all rebel ; 
he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers ; 
it is not the steady discipliue of an old society that suits 
him, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to 
pieces, or one in a state of formation. In temperament and 
character he is a harharian^ and a barbarian born to com- 
mand his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the 
sixth century or baron of the tenth century. 

A colossus with the head of a " Tartar," pitted with the 
small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask con- 
vulsed like that of a growling " bull-dog," witli small, cav- 



QEORQE JACQUES D ANTON, 407 

ernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a 
threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and moving and 
acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with pas- 
sion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illim- 
itable, like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when 
speaking, and heard through closed windows fifty yards off 
in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in 
earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge, and patriotic 
sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tran- 
quil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal, pro- 
fane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, 
and affectedly like Hebert, but spontaneously and to the 
point, full of crude jests worthy of Eabelais, possessing a 
stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and famil- 
iar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone ; in short, outwardly 
and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the confidence and 
sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all contributing 
to the formation of " his inborn, practical popularity," and 
to make of him " a grand seignior of sa7is-ctdotterie.^^ 

Thus endowed for playing a part, there is a strong 
temptation to act it the moment the theatre is ready, 
whether this be a mean one, got up for the occasion, and 
the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the part an 
ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who under- 
takes it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate 
object and definite result of the revolution, that is to say, 
the dictatorship of the violent minority. Immediately after 
the " 14th of July," 1789, he organized in his quarter of the 
city a small independent republic, aggressive and predomi- 
nant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and 
a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every 
available madcap, 'every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, 
newspaper scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or 
avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Freron, 
Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, Theroigne, Marat — while, in 
this more than Jacobin state, the model in anticipation of 



408 GREAT LEADERS, 

that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterward 
reign, the permanent president of the district, commander 
of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of 
bold undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he 
cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the 
principal pieces, filed off the blisterings, designed the action, 
adjusted the minor wheels, set it a-going and indicated what 
it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the ]olating 
which guarded it from the foreigner and against all outward 
violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing 
it, did he not serve as its engineer ? 

Because, if competent to construct it, he was not quali- 
fied to manage it. In a crisis he may take hold of the 
wheel himself, excite an assembly or a mob in his favor, 
carry things with a high hand, and direct an executive com- 
mittee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular, persistent 
labor ; he is not made for studying documents, for poring 
over papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. 
Never, like Eobespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both 
ofiicial and police duties at the same time, carefully reading 
minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extempo- 
rizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods, and 
acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor ; and, especially, 
he can never become the systematic executioner. 

On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray 
veil of theory ; he does not regard men through the " Con- 
trat- Social " as a sum of arithmetical units, but as they 
really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially 
those he knows, each with his peculiar j^hysiognomy and 
demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has 
any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart ; he had the 
quick sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the 
primitive instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, 
instincts which culture had neither impaired nor deadened, 
which allowed him to plan and permit the September mas- 
sacre, but which did not allow him to practice, daily and 



GEORGE JACQUES DALTON. 4C0 

blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in Sep- 
tember, "cloaking liis pity under his bellowing," he had 
shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. 
When the ax is about to fall on the Girondists, he is " ill 
with grief " and despair. " I am unable to save them," he 
exclaimed, " and big tears streamed down his cheeks." 

On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the band- 
age of incapacity or lack of forethought. He detected the 
innate vice of the system, the inevitable and approaching 
suicide of the revolution. " The Girondists forced us to 
throw ourselves upon the sans-culotterie which has devoured 
them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up." 
"Let Eobespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will 
soon be nothing left in France but a Thebaid of political 
Trappists." At the end he sees more clearly still. " On a 
day like this I organized the revolutionary tribunal. . . . 
I ask pardon for it of God and man. ... In revolutions, 
authority remains with the greatest scoundrels. ... It is 
better to be a poor fisherman than govern men." 

Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he con- 
structed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its 
creaking, it worked in conformity with its structure and the 
impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister 
machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all 
France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual 
life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it 
plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger 
supply of human material, while those who furnish this 
supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. 
Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way, 
diverts himself, gambles, forgets ; he supposes that the titu- 
lar decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of 
him ; in any case, they do not pursue him ; " they would not 
dare do it. . . . No one must lay hands on me ; I am the ark." 
At the worst he prefers " to be guillotined rather than guillo- 
tine." Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold. 
18 



410 GREAT LEADERS. 

EOBESPIERRE. 

By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. 

[Maximilian Marie Isadore de Robespierre, the most powerful fig- 
ure among the French revolutionists, born 1758, guillotined 1794. By 
profession an attorney, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, 
the States General, in 1789, from Arras. Profoundly imbued with the 
theories of Rousseau, he was from the beginning a fierce assailant of 
the monarchy, and after Mirabeau's death rapidly acquired a com- 
manding position in public affairs. In the National Convention, 
which succeeded the dissolution of the States General and the abdica- 
tion and imprisonment of Louis XVI, Robespierre was a prominent 
leader, and identified himself with the extreme party, the Jacobins, 
called the " Mountain," from the elevated seats on which they sat. 
During this earlier part of his political career he affected opposition to 
capital punishment, and remonstrated with Danton against the Sep- 
tember massacres. He led the Jacobins, however, in demanding the 
trial and death of the king, and proposed the decree organizing the 
Committee of Public Safety, which was clothed with omnipotent sway. 
When he became a member of this terrible body he speedily instituted 
what is known as " the Reign of Terror," beginning with the destruc- 
tion of the Girondists, against whom he formulated the deadly epi- 
gram : " There are periods in revolutions when to live is a crime." 
Danton was sacrificed to his envy and fears as a dangerous rival. 
Robespierre's overthrow, after about a year of practical dictatorship, 
was owing to two causes, which inspired the wavering courage of his 
opponents in the convention. The mistress of Tallien, a prominent 
revolutionist, lay in prison expecting a daily call to the guillotine. 
Carnot (the grandfather of the present chief of the French republic) at- 
tended a dinner-party at which Robespierre was present. The heat of 
the day had caused the guests to throw off their coats, and Carnot in 
looking for a paper took Robespierre's coat by mistake, in the pocket 
of which he saw the memorandum containing the names of those pre- 
scribed for the guillotine, among them his own and those of other 
guests. On the 9th Thermidor, July 27, 1794, occurred the outbreak 
in the convention which broke Roberspierre's power, and on the follow- 
ing day sent him to the guillotine, thus ending the Reign of Terror.] 

Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface 
themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who absorbs 



ROBESPIERRE. 411 

attention. If we would comprehend him we must look at 
him as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the 
last stage of an intellectual vegetation passing away, he re- 
mains on the last branch of the eighteenth century, the 
most abortive and driest oifshoot of the classical spirit. He 
has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but 
its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulae, the formulae of 
Eousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning "the people, 
nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality," a 
ready-made vocabulary, expressions too ample, the meaning 
of which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands 
of the disciple. He never tries to get at this ; his writings 
and speeches are merely long strings of vague abstract pe- 
riods ; there is no telling fact in them, no distinct, charac- 
teristic detail, no appeal to the eye evoking a living image, 
no personal, special observation, no clear, frank, original im- 
pression. 

It might be said of him that he never saw anything with 
his own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that false 
conceptions have intervened and fixed themselves between 
him and the object ; he combines these in logical sequence, 
and simulates the absent thought by an affected jargon, and 
this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of him likewise 
use the same scholastic jargon ; but none of them expatiate 
on it so lengthily. For hours, we grope after him in the 
vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold and per- 
plexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make 
something out of his colorless tirades, and w^e gi-asp nothing. 
We then, astonished, ask what all this talk amounts to, and 
why he talks at all ; the answer is, that he has said nothing 
and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a 
sectary preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher 
nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dog- 
matic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better 
if the hopper is empty ; the emptier it is the easier and faster 
the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he se- 



412 GREAT LEADERS. 

lects is used in a contrary sense ; the sonorous words justice, 
humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a 
text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burn- 
ing of heretics. 

Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary 
vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect, or government, 
even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant 
rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so vapid. On the 
eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was necessary to con- 
quer or die, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written 
and rewritten, polished and repolished, overloaded with 
studied ornaments and bits for effect, coated by dint of time 
and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of sym- 
metrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, preten- 
tions, apostrophes, and other tricks of the pen. There is no 
sign of true inspiration in his elaborate eloquence, nothing 
but recipes, and those of a worn-out art — Greek and Eoman 
commonplaces, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his 
dagger, classic metaphors like " the flambeaux of discord," 
and " the vessel of state," words couj)led together and beau- 
ties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college 
bench ; sometimes a grand bravura air, so essential for parade 
in public ; oftentimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in 
those days, one must have a tender heart ; in short, Mar- 
montel's method in " Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his 
"Eloges," all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior 
quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, 
powerful voice ; a sort of involuntary parody, and the more 
repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a senti- 
mental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because 
the studied elegances of the closet become pistol shots aimed 
at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends 
a man to the guillotine. 

Eobespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is 
sober ; he is not tormented by his senses ; if he gives way to 
them, it is only no further than he can help, and with a bad 



ROBESPIERRE, 413 

grace ; in the Rue Saintonge in Paris, " for seven montlis," 
says his secretary, " I knew of but one woman that he kept 
company with, and he did not treat her very well. . . . Very 
often he would not let her enter his room " ; when busy, he 
must not be disturbed ; he is naturally steady, hard-working, 
studious and fond of seclusion, at college a model pupil, at 
home in his province an attentive advocate, a punctual 
deputy in the Assembly, everywhere free of temptation and 
incapable of going astray. " Irreproachable " is the word 
which, from early youth, an inward voice constantly repeats 
to him in low tones to console him for obscurity and pa- 
tience. Thus has he ever been, is now, and ever will be ; 
he says this to himself, tells others so, and on this founda- 
tion, all of a piece, he builds up his character. He is not, 
like Desmoulins, to be seduced by dinners; like Barnave, 
by flattery ; like Mirabeau and Danton, by money ; like the 
Girondists, by the insinuating charm of ancient politeness 
and select society; like the Dantonists, by the bait of jovialty 
and unbounded license — he is the incorruptible. 

" Alone, or nearly alone, I do not allow myself to be cor- 
rupted; alone, or nearly alone, I do not compromise the 
right ; which two merits I possess in the highest degree. A 
few others may live correctly, but they oppose or betray 
principles ; a few others profess to have principles, but they 
do not live correctly. No one else leads so pure a life or is 
so loyal to principles ; no one else joins to so fervent a wor- 
ship of truth so strict a practice of virtue ; I am the unique." 
"What can be more agreeable than this mute soliloquy ? It 
is gently heard the first day in Robespierre's address to the 
Third Estate of Arras ; it is uttered aloud the last day in his 
great speech in the convention ; during the interval, it crops 
out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or 
reports, in exordiums, parentheses, and perorations, perme- 
ating every sentence like the drone of a bagpipe. In three 
years a chorus of a thousand voices, which he formed and 
led indefatigably, rehearses to him in unison his own litany, 



414 GREAT LEADERS. 

his most sacred creed, the hymn of three stanzas composed 
by him in his own honor, and which he daily recites to him- 
self in a low tone of voice, and often in a loud one : " Eobes- 
pierre alone has discovered the ideal citizen ! Robespierre 
alone attains to it without exaggeration or shortcomings ! 
Robespierre alone is worthy of and able to lead the revolu- 
tion ! " Cool infatuation carried thus far is equivalent to a 
raging fever, and Robespierre almost attains to the ideas and 
the ravings of Marat. 

First, in his own eyes, he, like Marat, is a persecuted 
man, and, like Marat, he poses himself as a " martyr," but 
more skillfully and keeping within bounds, affecting the 
resigned and tender air of an innocent victim, who, offering 
himself as a sacrifice, ascends to heaven, bequeathing to 
mankind the imperishable souvenir of his virtues. " I excite 
against me the self-love of everybody ; I sharpen against me 
a thousand daggers. I am a sacrifice to every species of 
hatred. ... To the enemies of my country, to whom my 
existence seems an obstacle to their heinous plots, I am ready 
to sacrifice it, if their odious empire is to endure ; ... let 
their road to the scaffold be the pathway of crime, ours shall 
be that of virtue ; ... let the hemlock be got ready for me, 
I await it on this hallowed spot. I shall at least bequeath 
to my country an example of constant affection for it, and 
to the enemies of humanity the disgrace of my death." 

Naturally, as always with Marat, he sees around him only 
" evil-doers," " intriguers," and " traitors." Naturally, as 
with Marat, common sense with him is perverted, and, like 
Marat again, he thinks at random. " I am not obliged to 
reflect," said he to Garat, "I always rely on first impres- 
sions." "For him," says the same authority, "the best 
reasons are suspicions," and nought makes headway against 
suspicions, not even the most positive evidence. 

Such assurance, equal to that of Marat, is terrible and 
worse in its effect, for Robespierre's list of conspirators is 
longer than that of Marat. Political and social, in Marat's 



ROBESPIERRE. 415 

mind, the list comprehends only aristocrats and the rich ; 
theological and moral in Robespierre's mind, it comprehends 
all atheists and dishonest persons — that is to say, nearly the 
whole of his party. In this narrow mind, given up to ab- 
stractions and habitually classifying men under two opposite 
headings, whoever is not with him on the good side is against 
him on the bad side, and, on the bad side, the common un- 
derstanding between the factious of every flag and the rogues 
of every degree is natural. Add all this vermin to that 
which Marat seeks to crush out ; it is no longer by hundreds 
of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jean Bon St. 
Andre, and Gutfroy, that the guilty must be counted and 
heads laid low ! And all these heads, Robespierre, according 
to his maxims, must strike off. He is well aware of this ; 
hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when 
alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as 
clearly as Marat. Marat's chimera, on first spreading out its 
wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel 
house ; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, 
reaches the goal in its turn ; in its turn, it demands some- 
thing to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of prin- 
ciples, begins to calculate the voracity of the monstrous 
brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this 
one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and 
teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years 
Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at the extreme point 
reached by Marat at the outset, and the theorist adopts 
the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost 
the vocabulary of the maniac; armed dictatorship of the 
urban mob, systematic maddening of the subsidized popu- 
lace, war against the bourgeoisie, extermination of the rich, 
proscription of opposition writers, administrators, and depu- 
ties. 

Both monsters demand the same food; only, Robes- 
pierre adds " vicious men " to the ration of his monster, by 
way of extra and preferable game. Henceforth, he may in 



416 GREAT LEADERS. 

vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his 
chaste ears, and raise iiis hypocritical eyes to heaven, he can 
not avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the 
streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of 
the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which 
he prances. Destructive instincts, long repressed by civiliza- 
tion, thus devoted to butchery, become aroused. His feline 
physiognomy, at first " that of a domestic cat, restless but 
mild, changes into the savage mien of the wild-cat, and next 
to the ferocious mien of the tiger. In the Constituent As- 
sembly he speaks with a whine, in the convention he froths 
at the mouth." The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-pro- 
fessor changes into the personal accent of furious passion ; 
he hisses and grinds his teeth ; sometimes, on a change of 
scene, he affects to shed tears. But his wildest outbursts 
are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The fester- 
ing grudges, corrosive envies, and bitter schemings which 
have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall 
vessels are full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the 
dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adver- 
saries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hebert, and especially 
Danton, probably because Danton was the active agent in 
the revolution of which he was simply the incapable peda- 
gogue ; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm 
corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. 
Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical 
machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other 
symptoms. When speaking in the tribune " his hands crisp 
with a sort of nervous contraction " ; sudden tremors agitate 
" his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and 
fro." " His bilious complexion becomes livid," his eyelids 
quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks ! " Ah," said 
a Montagnard^ " you would have voted as we did on the 9th 
of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs ! " " Phys- 
ically as well as morally," he becomes a second Marat, suffer- 
ing all the more because his delirium is not steady, and be- 



WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER. 41 7 

cause his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exter- 
minate on a grander scale. 

But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anx- 
ious, keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a school- 
master or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for gov- 
erning, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather 
the Pope, than the dictator of the revolution. He would 
prefer to remain a political Grandison ; he keeps the mask 
on to the very last, not only to the public and to others, but 
to himself and in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, 
has adhered to his skin ; he can no longer distinguish one 
from the other ; never did impostor more carefully conceal 
intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself 
that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told 
the truth. 

When nature and history combine to produce a character 
they succeed better than even man's imagination. Neither 
Moliere in his " Tartuffe," nor Shakespeare in his " Eichard 
III," dared bring on the stage a hypocrite believing himself 
sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as an Abel. 



WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER. 

By JOHN EICHAED GKEEN. 

[Son of the Earl of Chatham, born 1759, died 1806, and hardly less 
distinguished than his father as a statesman and orator. He became 
prime minister at the age of twenty-five, and showed a genius as par- 
liamentary leader which has never been surpassed and rarely equaled, 
retaining him in power in spite of his feebleness in the conduct of war 
and diplomacy. His great talents found their most congenial field in 
the management of home affairs, being the prototype of Mr. Gladstone 
in this respect. It is the younger Pitt's glory that with no able man 
in his own party to support him, he held power so long unshaken by the 
incessant assaults of such men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Lord North.] 

When Parliament came together after the overthrow of 
the Coalition, the minister of twenty-five was master of 



418 GREAT LEADERS. 

England as no minister had been before. Even the king 
yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for the triumph 
he had won for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of 
the madness which was soon to strike him down, but still 
more from a gradual discovery that the triumph which he 
had won over his political rivals had been won, not to the 
profit of the crown, but of the nation at large. The Whigs, 
it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a policy, 
while the Tories clung to the minister who had " saved the 
king." But it was the support of a new political power that 
really gave his strength to the young minister. The sudden 
rise of English hidustry was pushing the manufacturer to 
the front ; and all that the trading classes loved in Chat- 
ham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, 
his patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the 
world within the Parliament house, they saw in his son. 
He had little indeed of the poetic and imaginative side of 
Chatham's genius, of his quick perception of what was just 
and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions of na- 
tional policy, his outlook into the future of the world. 

Pitt's flowing and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow 
beside the broken phrases which still make his father's elo- 
quence a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand, 
he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was utterly 
wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and sensi- 
tive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His sim- 
plicity and good taste freed him from his father's ostenta- 
tion and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his 
speeches seem, they were adapted as much by their very 
qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity 
and good sense to the intelligence of the middle classes 
whom Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of 
peace, his immense industry, his dispatch of business, his 
skill in debate, his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir 
Robert Walpole ; but he had virtues which Walpole never 
possessed, and he was free from Walpole's worst defects: 



WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER. 419 

He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule 
by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any 
jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his apprecia- 
tion of youthful merits ; and the " boys " he gathered round 
him, such as Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his 
generosity by a devotion which death left untouched. With 
Walpole's cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. 
His policy from the first was one of active reform, and he 
faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, 
religious, from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he 
had none of "Walpole's scorn of his fellow-men. The noblest 
feature in his mind was its wide humanity. 

His love for England was as deep and personal as his 
father's love, but of the sympathy with English passion and 
English prejudice which had been at once his father's weak- 
ness and strength he had not a trace. When Fox taunted 
him with forgetting Chatham's jealousy of France and his 
faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt answered 
nobly that " to suppose any nation can be unalterably the 
enemy of another is weak and childish." The temper of 
the time and the larger sympathy of man with man, which 
especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point 
in the history of the human race, was everywhere bringing 
to the front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and 
Joseph II, whose characteristics were a love of mankind 
and a belief that as the happiness of the individual can 
only be secured by the general happiness of the com- 
munity to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual 
nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the 
world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high above 
the rest in the consummate knowledge, and the practical 
force which he brought to the realization of his aims. 

Pitt's strength lay in finance ; and he came forward at a 
time when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge 
of finance essential to. a great minister. The progress of the 
nation was wonderful. Population more than doubled dur- 



420 GREAT LEADERS. 

ing the eighteenth century, and the advance of wealth was 
even greater than that of population. The war had added 
a hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden was 
hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the com- 
merce with that country; and industry had begun that 
great career which was to make Britain the workshop of 
the world. Though England already stood in the first rank 
of commercial states at the accession of George III, her 
industrial life at home was mainly agricultural. The wool- 
trade had gradually established itself in Norfolk, the West 
Riding of Yorkshire, and the counties of the southwest; 
while the manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to 
Manchester and Bolton, and remained so unimportant that 
in the middle of the eighteenth century the export of cotton 
goods hardly reached the value of fifty thousand a year. 
There was the same slow and steady progress in the linen 
trade of Belfast and Dundee and the silks of Spitalfields. 
The processes of manufacture were too rude to allow any 
large increase of production. It was only where a stream 
gave force to turn a mill-wheel that the wool- worker could 
establish his factory ; and cotton was as yet spun by hand 
in the cottages, the " spinsters " of the family sitting with 
their distaffs round the weaver's handloom. But had the 
processes of manufacture been more efficient, they would 
have been rendered useless by the want of a cheap and easy 
means of transport. The older main roads, which had 
lasted fairly through the middle ages, had broken down in 
later times before the growth of traffic and the increase of 
wagons and carriages. 

The new lines of trade lay often along mere country lanes 
which had never been more than horse-tracks. Much of the 
woolen trade, therefore, had to be carried on by means of long 
trains of pack-horses ; and in the case of yet heavier goods, 
such as coal, distribution was almost impracticable, save along 
the greater rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. A 
new era began when the engineering genius of Brindley joined 



WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER. 42I 

Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 17G7, by a canal 
which crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct ; the success of 
the experiment soon led to the universal introduction of 
water-carriage, and Great Britain was traversed in every 
direction by three thousand miles of navigable canals. At 
the same time a new importance was given to the coal which 
lay beneath the soil of England. The stores of iron which 
had lain side by side with it in the northern counties had 
lain there unworked through the scarcity of wood, which 
was looked upon as the only fuel by which it could be 
smelted. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century a process for 
smelting iron with coal turned out to be effective ; and the 
whole aspect of the iron trade was at once revolutionized. 
Iron was to become the working material of the modern 
world ; and it is its production of iron which more than all 
else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. 
The value of coal as a means of producing mechanical force 
was revealed in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 trans- 
formed the steam-engine from a mere toy into the most 
wonderful instrument which human industry has ever had 
at its command. The invention came at a moment when 
the existing supply of manual labor could no longer cope 
with the demands of the manufacturers. Three successive 
inventions in twelve years, that of the spinning- jenny in 
1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, of the spinning-machine in 
1768 by the barber Arkwright, of the " mule " by the weaver 
Crompton in 1776, were followed by the discovery of the 
power-loom. But these would have been comparatively use- 
less had it not been for the revelation of a new and inex- 
haustible labor-force in the steam-engine. It was the com- 
bination of such a force with such means of applying it that 
enabled Britain during the terrible years of her struggle 
with France and Napoleon to all but monopolize the woolen 
and cotton trades, and raised her into the greatest manu- 
facturing country that the world had seen. 



422 GREAT LEADERS. 

To deal wisely with sucli a growth required a knowledge 
of the laws of wealth which would have been impossible at 
an earlier time. But it had become possible in the days 
of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the effect which 
they have produced on the fortunes of mankind the 
" Wealth of Nations " must rank among the greatest of 
books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford scholar and 
a professor at Glasgow. Labor, he contended, was the one 
source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labor, by suffer- 
ing the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, 
that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any at- 
tempt to force labor into artificial channels, to shape by laws 
the course of commerce, to promote special branches of in- 
dustry in particular countries, or to fix the character of the 
intercourse between one country and another, is not only 
a wrong to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful 
to the wealth of a state. The book was publislied in 177G, 
at the opening of the American war, and studied by Pitt 
during liis career as an undergraduate at Cambridge. 
From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master. He 
had hardly become minister before he took the principles of 
the " Wealth of Nations " as the groundwork of his policy. 
The ten earlier years of his rule marked a new point of de- 
parture in English statesmanship. Pitt was the first English 
minister who really grasped the part which industry was to 
play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not 
only a peace minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, 
but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay 
in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse be- 
tween nations ; that public economy not only lessened the 
general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of 
industry ; and that finance might be turned from a mere 
means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of political 
and social improvement. 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 423 

NAPOLEON BONAPAKTE. 

Br LOUIS ADOLPIIE THIEES. 

[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 17G9, died a prisoner on the 
island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of 
Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieutenant of artillery at 
the age of sixteen. He had become a captain when the revolution 
reached its height in the Reign of Terror. Though never an actor in 
the horrors of Jacobin rule, he was supposed to have been a warm 
friend of Robespierre. After the fall of the terrorists Napoleon took 
the side of the convention, and at the head of its troops dispersed the 
infuriated mob of Montagnards with the famous "whiff of grape- 
shot " which blew up the last remains of the party of 1793. After his 
marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, the young soldier was appointed 
to the command of the army of Italy. In two years Napoleon, in a 
series of splendid battles, annihilated four Austrian armies, liberated 
Italy, and forced Austria to a humiliating peace. After the failure of 
the Egyptian expedition Napoleon returned to France, and by the 
coup d'etat of December, 1799, attained supreme power as first consul. 
The second Italian campaign of 1800 was no less brilliant than the 
first, culminating in the battle of Marengo. In 1802 Napoleon was 
made life-consul, " the swelling prologue of the imperial theme," for 
nine months later he assumed the title of emperor, and was crowned 
by Pope Pius VII at Notre Dame. The year 1812 was the beginning 
of the disasters which finally dethroned him. The terrible Russian 
campaign, and the utter defeat of his arms in Spain by Lord Welles- 
ley, afterward Duke of Wellington, marked a change in the clock 
of destiny. The great European coalition of 1813 brought overwhelm- 
ing forces against him, resulting in the great battle of Dresden, lasting 
three days — October 16th, 17th, and 18th — which broke the French 
power. The allies entered Paris, March 81, 1814, and Napoleon abdi- 
cated on April 11th. His exile in Elba lasted less than ten months, 
and on his return to France two hundred thousand men rallied to him 
at his call. The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 15, 1815, ended 
in his overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, 
assisted by Marshal Bllicher. Napoleon's second abdication was fol- 
lowed by his surrender to the English, and his exile to St. Helena for 
the rest of his life.] 

Napoleok was endowed by nature with a clear, pene- 
trating, vast, comprehensive, and peculiarly active mind, 



424 GREAT LEADERS. 

nor had he less decision of character than clearness of intel- 
lect. He always seized at once the decisive argument, in 
battle the most effective movement. To conceive, resolve, 
and perform were with him but one indivisible act, so won- 
derful was his rapidity, that not a moment was spent in 
reflection between perception and action. Any obstacle 
presented to such a mind by a trifling objection, by indolence, 
weakness, or disaffection, served but to cause his anger to 
spring forth and cover you with its foam. Had he chosen 
some civil profession where success can only be attained by 
persuading men and winning them over, he might have 
endeavored to subdue or moderate his fiery temperament, 
but flung into the career of arms, and endowed with the 
sovereign faculty of seeing the surest means of conquest at 
a glance, he became at one bound the ruler of Italy, at a 
second the master of the French Republic, at a third the 
sovereign of Europe. 

What wonder that a nature formed so impetuous by God 
should become more so from success ; what wonder if he 
were abrupt, violent, domineering, and unbending in his 
resolutions ! If apart from the battle-field he exercised that 
tact so necessary in civil business, it was in the council of 
state, though even there he decided questions with a sagacity 
and clearness of judgment that astonished and subdued his 
hearers, except on some few occasions when he was misled 
for a moment by passion or want of sufficient knowledge of 
the subject under discussion. Both nature and circum- 
stances combined to make him the most despotic and im- 
petuous of men. 

In contemplating his career, it does not appear that this 
fiery, despotic nature revealed itself at once or altogether. 
In his youth he was lean, taciturn, and even sad — sad from 
concentrated ambition that feeds upon itself until it finds 
an outlet and attains the object of its desires. As a young 
man he was sometimes rude, morose, until becoming the 
object of universal admiration he became more open, calm. 



NAPOLEOJS BONAPARTE. 425 

and communicative — lost the meagerness that made his 
countenance so expressive, and, as one may say, unfolded 
himself. Consul for life, emperor, conqueror at Marengo 
and Austerlitz, still exercising some little restraint on him- 
self, he seemed to have reached the apogee of his moral ex- 
istence ; and his figure, then moderately stout, was radiant 
with regular and manly beauty. But soon, when nations 
submitted and sovereigns bowed before him, he was no 
longer restrained by respect for man or even for nature. 
He dared, attempted all things ; spoke without restraint ; 
was gay, familiar, and often intemperate in language. His 
moral and physical nature became more develoj)ecl, nor did 
his extreme stoutness diminish his Olympian beauty; his 
fuller countenance still preserved the eagle glance; and 
when descending from his accustomed height from which 
he excited admiration, fear, and hatred, he became merry, 
familiar, and almost vulgar, he could resume his dignity in 
a moment, for he was able to descend without demeaning 
himself. And when at length, in advancing life, he is sup- 
posed to be less active or less daring, because of his increas- 
ing embonpoint^ or because Fortune had ceased to smile on 
him, he bounds more impetuously than ever on his charger, 
and shows that for his ardent mind matter is no burden, 
misfortune no restraint. 

Such were the successive developments of this extraordi- 
nary nature. It is not easy to estimate Napoleon's moral 
qualities, for it is rather difficult to discover goodness in a 
soldier who was continually strewing the earth with dead, 
or friendship in a man who never knew an equal, or probity 
in a potentate in whose power were the riches of the uni- 
verse. Still, though an exception to all ordinary rules, we 
may occasionally catch some traits of the moral physiog- 
nomy of this extraordinary man. 

In all things promptness was his distinctive character- 
istic. He would become angry, but would recover his calm- 
ness with wonderful facility, almost ashamed of his excite- 



426 GREAT LEADERS. 

ment, laughing at it if he could do so without compromising 
his dignity, and would again address with affectionate words 
or gestures the officer he had overpowered by his burst of 
passion. His anger was sometimes affected for the purpose 
of intimidating subalterns who neglected their duty. When 
real, his displeasure passed like a flash of lightning ; when 
affected, it lasted as long as it was needed. When he was 
no longer obliged to command, restrain, or impel men, he 
became gentle, simple, and just, just as every man of great 
mind is who understands human nature, and appreciates 
and pardons its weaknesses because he knows that they are 
inevitable. At St. Helena, deprived of all external pres- 
tige, his power departed, without any other ascendant over 
his companions than that derived from his intellect and dis- 
position, Napoleon ruled them with absolute sway, won 
them by unchanging amiability ; and that to such a degree 
that having feared him for the greater part of their lives, 
they ended by loving him for the remainder. On the battle- 
field he had acquired an insensibility that was almost fear- 
ful ; he could behold unmoved the ground covered with a 
hundred thousand lifeless bodies, for none had ever caused 
so much human blood to flow as he. 

This insensibility was, so to speak, a consequence of his 
profession. Often in the evening he would ride over the 
battle-field, which in the morning he had strewed with all 
the horrors of war, to see that the wounded were removed, a 
proceeding that might be the result of policy, but was not ; 
and he frequently sprang from his horse to assure himself 
whether in an apparently lifeless body the vital spark did 
not still linger. At Wagram he saw a fine young man, in 
the uniform of the cuirassiers, lying on the ground with his 
face covered with clotted blood ; he sprang at once from his 
horse, supported the head of the wounded youth on his 
knee, restored him by the aid of some spirituous remedy, 
and said, smiling : " He will recover, it is one more saved ! " 
These are no proofs of want of feeling. 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 427 

In everything connected with finance he was almost 
avaricious, disputing even about a centime, while he would 
give millions to his friends, servants, or the poor. Having 
discovered that a distinguished savant who had accom- 
panied him to Egypt was in embarrassed circumstances, he 
sent him a large sum, blaming him at the same time for not 
having told him of his position. In 1813, having expended 
all his ready money, and learning that a lady of high birth, 
who had once been very rich, was in want of the neces- 
saries of life, he immediately appointed her a pension of 
twenty-four thousand francs, as much as fifty thousand at 
the present time, and being told that she was eighty-four 
years of age, " Poor woman," he said, " let her be paid four 
years in advance." These, we must repeat, are no indica- 
tions of want of kindness of disposition. 

Having but little time to devote to private friendships, 
removed from them by his superiority to other men, but 
still, under the influence of time and habit, he did become 
attached to some, so strongly attached as to be indulgent 
even to weakness to those he loved. This was the case with 
regard to his relatives, whose pretensions often provoked his 
anger ; yet, seeing them annoyed, he relented, and to gratify 
them, often did what he knew to be unwise. Although the 
admiration he had felt for the Empress Josephine passed 
away with time, and though she had, by many thoughtless 
acts, lowered herself in the esteem he always entertained for 
her, he had for her, even after his divorce, the most profound 
affection. He wept for Duroc, but in secret, as though it 
were a weakness. 

As to his probity, we know not by what standard to esti- 
mate such a quality in a man who from the very commence- 
ment of his public career had immense riches at his com- 
mand. When he became commander-in-chief of the army 
in Italy and was master of all the wealth of the country, he 
first supplied his army abundantly, and then sent assistance 
to the army on the Rhine, reserving nothing for himself, or 



428 GREAT LEADERS, 

at most only a sum sufficient to purchase a small house, Eue 
de la Victoire, a purchase for which one year's pay would 
have sufficed ; and had he died in Egypt, his widow would 
have been left destitute. Was this the result of pride, dis- 
dain of vulgar enjoyments, or honesty ? Perhaps there was 
a little of all in this forbearance, which was not unexampled 
among our generals, though certainly as rare then as it has 
ever been. He punished dishonesty with extreme severity, 
which might be attributed to his love of order ; but, what 
was still better, and seemed to indicate that he possessed the 
quality of honesty himself, was the positive affection he 
showed for honest people, carried so far as to take keen 
pleasure in their society. 

Still this man, whom God had made so great and so 
good, was not a virtuous man, for virtue consists in a fixed 
idea of duty, to which all our inclinations, all our desires, 
moral and physical, must be subjected, and which could not 
be the case with one who, of all that ever lived, put least 
restraint upon his passions. But if wholly deficient in what 
is abstractly understood as virtue, he possessed certain 
special virtues, particularly those of a warrior and states- 
man. He was temperate, not prone to sensual gratifications, 
and, it not exactly chaste he was not a libertine, never, ex- 
cept on occasions of ceremony, remained more than a few 
minutes at table ; he slept on a hard bed though his con- 
stitution was rather weak than strong, bore, without even 
perceiving it, an amount of fatigue that would have ex- 
hausted the most vigorous soldiers ; and was capable of pro- 
digious exertion when mentally occupied with some great 
undertaking 

He did more than brave danger, he seemed unconscious 
of its existence, and was ever to be found wherever he was 
needed to see, direct, or command. Such was his character 
as a soldier ; as a general he was not inferior. 

Never had the cares of a vast military command been 
borne with more coolness, vigor, or presence of mind. If 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 429 

he were occasionally excited or angry, the officers who knew 
him best said that all ivas going on well. AVhen the danger 
became serious, he was calm, mild, encouraging, not wishing 
to add the excitement attendant on his displeasure to that 
which naturally arose from the circumstances ; he remained 
perfectly calm, a power acquired by the habit of restraining 
his emotions in great emergencies, and, calculating the ex- 
tent of the danger, turning it aside, and thus triumphing 
over fortune. Formed for great emergencies and familiar- 
ized by habit to every species of peril, he stood by, in 1814, 
a calm spectator of the suicidal destruction of his own power, 
a destruction achieved by his ambition ; arid still he hoped 
when all around despaired, because he perceived resources 
undivined by anybody else, and under all vicissitudes, soar- 
ing on the wings of genius above the shock of circumstances, 
and with the resignation of a self -judged mind he accepted 
the deserved punishment of his faults. 

Such, in our opinion, was this man, so strange, so self- 
contradicting, so many-sided. If among the princij^al traits 
of his character there is one more prominent than the rest, 
it is a species of moral intemperance. A prodigy of genius 
and passion, flung into the chaos of a revolution, his nature 
unfolds and develops itself therein. He masters that wild 
confusion, replaces it by his own presence, and displays the 
energy, audacity, and fickleness of that which he replaced. 
Succeeding to men who stopped at nothing, either in virtue 
or crime, in heroism or cruelty, surrounded by men who 
laid no restraints on their passions, he laid none on his ; 
they wished to convert the world into a universal republic, 
he would have it an equally boundless monarchy ; they 
turned everything into chaos, he formed an almost tyran- 
nical unity ; they disorganized everything, he re-established 
order ; they defied sovereigns, he dethroned them ; they 
slaughtered men on the scaffold, he on the battle-field, 
where blood was shrouded in glory. He immolated more 
human beings than did any Asiatic conqueror, and within 



430 OREAl LEADERS. 

the narrow precincts of Europe, peopled with opposing na- 
tions, he conquered a greater space of territory than Tam- 
erlane or Genghis Khan amid the deserts of Asia. 

It was reserved for the French revolution, destined to 
change the aspect of European society, to produce a man 
who would fix the attention of the world as powerfully as 
Charlemagne, Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander. He pos- 
sessed every qualification that could strike, attract, and fix 
the attention of mankind, whether we consider the great- 
ness of the part he was destined to perform, the vastness of 
the political convulsions he caused, the splendor, extent, and 
profundity of his genius, or his majestic gravity of thought. 
This son of a Corsican gentleman, who received the gratui- 
tous military education that ancient royalty bestowed on the 
sons of the poor nobility, had scarcely left school when in a 
sanguinary tumult he obtained the rank of commander-in- 
chief, then left the Parisian army for that of Italy, con- 
quered that country in a month, successively destroyed all 
the forces of the European coalition, wrested from them the 
peace of Campo-Formio, and then becoming too formidable 
to stand beside the government of the republic, he went to 
seek a new destiny in the East, passed through the English 
fleet with five hundred ships, conquered Egypt at a stride, 
then thought of following Alexander's footstejDS in the con- 
quest of India. But suddenly recalled to the West by the 
renewal of the European war, after having attempted to 
imitate Alexander, he imitated and equaled Hannibal in 
crossing the Alps, again overpowered the coalition, and com- 
pelled it to accept the peace of Luneville, and at thirty 
years of age this son of a poor Corsican nobleman had 
already run through a most extraordinary career. 

Become pacific for a while, he by his laws laid the basis 
of modern society; but again yielding to the impulses of 
his restless genius, he once more attacked Europe, van- 
quished her in three battles — Austerlitz, Jena, and Eriedland 
— set up and threw down kingdoms, placed the crown of 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 431 

Charlemagne on liis head ; and when kings came to offer 
him their daughters, chose the descendant of the Caesars, 
who presented him with a son that seemed destined to wear 
the most brilliant crown in the universe. He advanced 
from Cadiz to Moscow, where he was subjected to the 
greatest catastrophe on record, rose again, but was again 
defeated, and confined in a small island, from which he 
emerged with a few hundred faithful soldiers, recovered the 
crown of France in twenty days, struggled again against 
exasperated Europe, sank for the last time at Waterloo, and 
having sustained greater wars than those of the Koman 
Empire, went — he, the child of a Mediterranean isle — to die 
on an island in the ocean, bound like Prometheus by the 
fear and hatred of kings to a rock. 

This son of a poor Corsican nobleman has indeed played 
in the world the parts of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and 
Charlemagne ! He possessed as much genius as the greatest 
among them; acquired as much fame as the most cele- 
brated, and unfortunately shed more blood than any of 
them. In a moral point of view, he is inferior to the 
best of these great men but superior to the worst. His 
ambition was not as futile as that of Alexander, nor as 
depraved as that of Caesar, but it was not as respectable as 
Hannibal's, who sacrificed himself to save his country the 
misfortune of being conquered. His ambition was that 
usual with conquerors who seek to rule after having ag- 
grandized their native land. Still he loved France and 
cherished her glory as dearly as his own. 

As a ruler he sought what was right, but sought it as a 
despot, nor did he pursue it with the consistency or religious 
perseverance of Charlemagne. In variety of talents he was 
inferior to Caesar, who, being compelled to win over his 
fellow-citizens before ruling them, had to learn how to per- 
suade as well as how to fight, and could speak, write, and 
act with a certain simple majesty. Napoleon, on the other 
hand, having acquired power by waifare, had no need of 



432 GREAT LEADERS. 

oratory, nor possibly, though endowed with natural elo- 
quence, could he ever have acquired it, since he never would 
have taken the trouble of patiently analyzing his thought in 
presence of a deliberative assembly. He could write as he 
thought, with force and dignity, but he was sometimes a 
little declamatory like his mother, the French revolution ; 
he argued with more force than Caesar, but could not nar- 
rate with his extreme simplicity or exquisite taste. He was 
inferior to the Roman dictator in the variety of his talents, 
but superior as a general, both by his peculiar military 
genius and by the daring profundity and inexhaustible 
fertility of his plans, in which he had but one equal or 
superior (which we can not decide) — Hannibal ; for he was 
as daring, as prudent, as subtle, as inventive, as terrible, and 
as obstinate as the Carthaginian general, with one advantage 
of living at a later period. Succeeding to Hannibal, Caesar, 
the Nassaus, Gustavus Adolphus, Conde, Turenne, and 
Frederick, he brought military art to its ultimate perfec- 
tion. God alone can estimate the respective merits of such 
men ; all we can do is to sketch some prominent traits of 
their wonderful characters. 



DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 

By AECHIBALD ALISON. 

[Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, third son of the Earl of 
Mornington, born 1769, died 1852. Previous to taking command of 
the British armies in Spain against the French, Sir Arthur Wellesley 
had achieved great distinction and the rank of major-general in India. 
Shortly after his appointment to the Spanish command as lieutenant- 
general in 1808, he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington ; 
and his brilliant success against Napoleon's most eminent marshals 
stamped him as one of the first soldiers of the age. In 1815 Welling- 
ton was placed at the head of the English forces and their allies, to 
meet Napoleon in that last convulsive struggle which ended with the 



DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 433 

battle of Waterloo. Made field-marshal and duke for his eminent serv- 
ices, Wellington afterward signalized his capacity for civil adminis- 
tration as little inferior to his military skill, and as premier displayed 
the most wise and liberal statesmanship.] 

The name of no commander in the long array of British 
greatness will occupy so large a space in the annals of the 
world as that of Wellington ; and yet there are few whose 
public characters possess, with so many excellences, so sim- 
ple and unblemished a complexion. It is to the purity and 
elevation of his principles in every public situation that 
this enviable distinction is to be ascribed. Intrusted early 
in life with high command, and subjected from the first to 
serious responsibility, he possessed that singleness of heart 
and integrity of purpose which, even more than talent or 
audacity, are the foundations of true and moral courage, 
and the only pure path to public greatness ; a sense of duty, 
a feeling of honor, a generous patriotism, a forgetfulness of 
self, constituted the spring of all his actions. 

He was ambitious, but it was to serve his king and coun- 
try only ; fearless, because his whole heart was wound up in 
these noble objects ; disinterested, because the enriching of 
himself or his family never for a moment crossed his mind ; 
insensible to private fame when it interfered with public 
duty, indifferent to popular obloquy when it arose from rec- 
titude of conduct. Like the Roman patriot, he wished 
rather to be than appear deserving. "Esse quam bonus 
malebat, ita quo minus gloriam petebat eo magis adseque- 
batur." Greatness was forced upon him, both in military 
and political life, rather because he was felt to be worthiest, 
than because he desired to be the first ; he was the architect 
of his own fortune, but he became so almost unconsciously, 
while solely engrossed in constructing that of his country. 
He has left undone many things, as a soldier, which might 
have added to his fame, and done many things, as a states- 
'man, which were fatal to his power ; but he omitted the first 
19 



434 GREAT LEADERS. 

because they would have endangered his country, and com- 
mitted the second because he felt them to be essential to its 
salvation. 

It is the honor of England, and of human nature, that 
such a man should have risen at such a time to the rule 
of her armies and her councils ; but he experienced with 
Themistocles and Scipio Africanus the mutable tenure of 
popular applause and the base ingratitude of those whom 
he had saved. Having triumphed over the arms of the 
threatened tyrant, he was equally immovable in the pres- 
ence of the insane citizens ; and it is hard to say whether 
his greatness appeared most when he struck down the con- 
queror of Europe on the field of Waterloo, or was himself 
with difficulty rescued from death on its anniversary, eight- 
een years afterward, in the streets of London. 

A constant recollection of these circumstances, and of 
the peculiar and very difficult task which was committed to 
his charge, is necessary in forming a correct estimate of the 
Duke of Wellington's military achievements. The brilliancy 
of his course is well known ; an unbroken series of triumphs 
from Vimiero to Toulouse ; the entire expulsion of the 
French from the Peninsula ; the planting of the British 
standard in the heart of France ; the successive defeat of 
those veteran marshals who had so long conquered in every 
country of Europe ; the overthrow of Waterloo ; the hurling 
of Napoleon from his throne ; and the termination, in one 
day, of the military empire founded on twenty years of con- 
quest. But these results, great and imperishable as they are, 
convey no adequate idea, either of the difficulties with which 
Wellington had to contend, or of the merit due to his tran- 
scendent exertions. With an army seldom superior in num- 
ber to a single corps of the French marshals ; with troops 
dispirited by recent disasters, and wholly unaided by prac- 
tical experience ; without any compulsory law to recruit his 
ranks, or any strong national passion for war to supply its 
Avants, he was called on to combat successively vast armies. 



DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 435 

composed, in great part, of veteran soldiers, perpetually filled 
by the terrible powers of the conscription, headed by the 
chiefs who, risen from the ranks, and practically acquainted 
with the duties of war in all its grades, had fought their way 
from the grenadier's musket to the marshal's baton, and 
were followed by men who, trained in the same school, were 
animated by the same ambition. 

Still more, he was the general of a nation in which the 
chivalrous and mercantile qualities are strongly blended to- 
gether ; which, justly proud of its historic glory, is unrea- 
sonably jealous of its military expenditure ; which covetous 
beyond measure of warlike renown, is ruinously impatient 
of pacific preparation ; which starves its establishment when 
danger is over, and yet frets at defeat when its terrors are 
present; which dreams, in war, of Cressy and Agincourt, 
and ruminates, in peace, on economic reduction. 

He combated at the head of an alliance formed of hete- 
rogeneous states, composed of discordant materials, in which 
ancient animosities and religious divisions were imperfectly 
suppressed by recent fervor or present danger ; in which 
corruption often paralyzed the arm of patriotism, and jeal- 
ousy withheld the resources of power. He acted under the 
direction of a ministry which, albeit zealous and active, was 
alike inexperienced in hostility and unskilled in combina- 
tions ; in presence of an opposition which, powerful in elo- 
quence, supported by faction, was prejudiced against the 
war, and indefatigable to arrest it ; for the interests of a peo- 
ple, who, although ardent in the cause and enthusiastic in 
its support, were impatient of disaster and prone to depres- 
sion, and whose military resources, how great soever, were 
dissipated in the protection of a colonial empire which en- 
circled the earth. 

Nothing but the most consummate prudence, as well as 
ability in conduct, could with such means have achieved 
victory over such an enemy, and the character of Welling- 
ton was singularly fitted for the task. Capable, when the 



436 GREAT LEADERS. 

occasion required or opportunity was afLorded, of the most 
daring enterprises, he was yet cautious and wary in his gen- 
eral conduct ; prodigal of his own labor, regardless of his 
own person, he was avaricious only of the blood of his sol- 
diers. Endowed by Nature with an indomitable soul, a 
constitution of iron, he possessed that tenacity of purpose 
and indefatigable activity which is ever necessary to great 
achievements ; prudent in council, sagacious in design, he 
was yet prompt and decided in action. No general ever 
revolved the probable dangers of an enterprise more anx- 
iously before undertaking it, none possessed in a higher 
degree the eagle eye, the arm of steel, necessary to carry it 
into execution. 

By the steady application of these rare qualities he was 
enabled to raise the British military force from an unworthy 
state of depression to an unparalleled pitch of glory; to 
educate, in presence of the enemy, not only his soldiers in 
the field, but his rulers in the cabinet ; to silence, by avoid- 
ing disaster, the clamor of his enemies ; to strengthen, by 
progressive success, the ascendency of his friends ; to aug- 
ment, by the exhibition of its results, the energy of the gov- 
ernment ; to rouse, by deeds of glory, the enthusiasm of the 
people. 

Skillfully seizing the opportunity of victory, he studi- 
ously avoided the chances of defeat; aware that a single 
disaster would at once endanger his prospects, discourage 
his countrymen, and strengthen his opponents, he was con- 
tent to forego many opportunities of earning fame, and 
stifle many desires to grasp at glory ; magnanimously check- 
ing the aspirations of genius, he trusted for ultimate success 
rather to perseverance in a wise, than audacity in a daring 
course. He thus succeeded during six successive campaigns, 
with a comparatively inconsiderable army, in maintaining 
his ground against the vast and veteran forces of Napoleon, 
in defeating successively all his marshals, baffling success- 
ively all his enterprises, and finally rousing such an enthu- 



DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 43^ 

siastic spirit in the British Empire as enabled its Govern- 
ment to put forth its immense resources on a scale worthy 
of its present greatness and ancient renown, and terminate 
a contest of twenty years by planting the English standard 
on the walls of Paris. 



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ary of Universal History, a Biographical Dictionary. 

WITH GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 

FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND READERS. 

By LOUIS HEILPRIN. 



New edition. Crown 8vo. Half leather, $3.C0. 

" A second revised edition of Mr. Louis Tleilprin's ' Historical Reference-Book ' has 
just appeared, markinsr ttie well-earned success of this admirable work — a dictionary 
of dates, a dictionary of events (with a special gazetteer for the places mentioned), and 
a concise biographical dictionary, all in one, and all in the highest degree trustworthy. 
Mr. Heilprin's revision is as thorough as his original work. Any one can test it by 
running over the list of persons deceased since this manual first appeared. Correc- 
tions, too, have been made, as we can testily in one instance at least." — New York 
Evening Post. 

" One of the raost complete, compact, and valuable works of reference yet pro- 
duced."— 7'ro2^Z>ae/y ?'mg.?. 

" Unequaled in its field."— 5o5tow. Courier. 

"A small library in \i?,e\V''— Chicago Dial. 

"An invaluable book of reference, useful alike to the student and the general reader. 
The arrangeuient could scarcely be better or more convenient." — New York Herald. 

"The conspectus of the world's history presented in the first part of the book isaa 
full as the wisest terseness could put within the space." — Philadelphia American. 

" We miss hardly anything that we should consider desirable, and we have not been 
able to detect a single mistake or misprint." — New York Nation. 

" So far as we have tested the accuracy of the present work we have found it with- 
out flaw."— 6%/•^■.s^^att Union. 

" The conspicuous merits of the work are condensation and accuracy. These points 
alone should suffice to give the ' Historical Eeference-Book ' a place in every public 
and private library."— Boston Beacon. 

"The method of the tabulation is admirable for ready reference."— iVe?f> York 
Home Journal. 

"This cyclopaedia of condensed knowledge is a work that will speedily become a 
necessity to the general read< r, as well as to the stnAenV— Detroit Free Press. 

"For clearness, correctness, and the readiness with which the reader can find the 
information of which he is in search, the volume is far in adA'ance of any work of its 
kmd with which we are aeqwamte^."'— Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. 

"The latest dates have been criven. The geographical notes which acccmpany 
the historical incidents are a novel addition, and exceedingly helpful. The size ali^o 
commends it, making it convenient for constant reference, while the three divisions 
and careful elimination of minor and uninterestina incidents make it much easier to 
find dates and events about which accuracy is necessary. Sir WiHiam Hamilton avers 
that too retentive a memory tends to hinder the development of the judgment by pre- 
senting too much for decision. A work like this is thus better than memory. It is a 
' mental larder ' vv'hich needs no care, and whose contents are ever available."— AeM 
York University Quarttrly. 

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bend Street. 



